Classifying locative copula deiy in Cameroon Pidgin English

Research field: This paper examines a corpus of spoken Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) to ascertain whether the locative copula deiy in CPE is best classified as a verbal or non-verbal copula. Background: Cameroon Pidgin English is a poorly-described Atlantic creole. CPE has both a verbal copula bi and non-verbal identificational copula na. Verbs in CPE can be preceded by markers of tense, mood, modality and aspect (TMA markers), which is the case for bi but not for na. Deiy appears to co-occur with some TMA markers. However, the case for verbal classification is complicated by the multi-functional nature of CPE expressions: one form can correspond to several categories, allowing multiple interpretations of potential TMA + deiy combinations. For example, bi can be either copula verb or anterior tense marker, while deiy can be either locative copular or locative adverb. The two possible interpretations of bi + deiy are shown in (1) and (2). (1) Wi bi deiy insait moto 1PL COP there inside car ‘We are there in the car.’ (2) Wi bi deiy insait moto 1PL ANT COP inside car ‘We were in the car.’ Method: The primary data for this project is a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded corpus of CPE, currently containing 144.000 words, created by my supervisor, Dr Melanie Green, and her colleagues at Sheffield and Yaounde. To analyse its categorial status, all instances of deiy were extracted from the corpus. Straightforward examples of locative adverb deiy were set aside, yielding a dataset of 1,000 examples for investigation. Participant metadata was considered to ascertain whether the categorial status of deiy reflects lectal variation (acrolect versus basilect). Findings: Preliminary findings show speakers across the acrolect-basilect continuum combine deiy with several TMA markers, suggesting that it is best described as a verbal copula.