Melanie Green

Cameroon Pidgin English: a comprehensive grammar

Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) is an English-lexified Atlantic expanded pidgin/creole spoken in some form by an estimated 50% of Cameroon’s population, primarily in the anglophone west regions, but also in urban centres throughout the country. Primarily a spoken language, CPE enjoys a vigorous oral presence in Cameroon, and the linguistic examples illustrating this description are drawn from a spoken corpus consisting of a range of text types, including oral narratives, radio broadcasts and spontaneous conversation. The authors’ typologically-framed investigation of the features of the language, from its phonetics, phonology and lexicon to its syntax and discourse structure, allows the reader a clear view of the linguistic character of CPE, offering a comprehensive description of the language that will be of interest to creolists as well as linguists interested in African languages, contact linguistics and comparative linguistics.

Levels of Adequacy, Observational, Descriptive, Explanatory

Levels of adequacy are design criteria that have played a central role in the transformational generative grammar model since its inception in the 1950s. According to Chomsky, an adequate model of language not only must state what combinations of expressions do and do not give rise to grammatical sentences (observational adequacy) but must also account for the knowledge system underlying the intuitions of the native speaker (descriptive adequacy) and explain how such knowledge is acquired (explanatory adequacy). The tension between the goals of descriptive and explanatory adequacy has led to important developments in the Chomskyan model over the past half century.