ARTÍCULOS DE INVESTIGACIÓN

Eyo Offiong Mensah*

* holds a Ph.D in Linguistics from University of Calabar, Nigeria where he is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Communication Studies. Mailing Address: P. O. Box 1412, Calabar Cross River State, Nigeris. E-mail: eyomensah@unical.edu.ng

Received: 12-03-11Reviewed: 05-14-12 / Accepted: 05-22-12 / Published: 08-01-12

How to reference this article: Mensah, E. (2012). Grammaticalization in Nigerian Pidgin. Ikala, revista de lenguaje y cultura, 17(2), 167-179

ABSTRACT

Nigerian Pidgin (hereafter NP) has assumed elaborated roles and functions, gaining new grounds in different sociolinguistic domains as a result of its sustained social expansion process. One of the consequences of this increased dynamism of NP is the development of lexical items into grammatical markers which is an expected natural process. In this paper, we examine language-internal mechanisms that transform lexical items into morphosyntactic items either for semantic value, creativity, expressivity or routinization. Our basic argument is that grammaticalization in NP is not contact-induced but a language-internal phenomenon, which reveals that NP has both a synchronic and diachronic existence that are imperative in evolving its unique grammar.

Keywords: grammaticalization, Nigerian Pidgin, contact linguistics, grammar, semantic change.

RESUMEN

Como resultado de su proceso sostenido de expansión social, el pidgin nigeriano (en adelante NP) ha adoptado roles y funciones elaboradas, adquiriendo nuevos terrenos en diferentes ámbitos. Una de las consecuencias de este mayor dinamismo del NP es el desarrollo de unidades léxicas en los marcadores gramaticales, lo cual constituye un proceso natural esperado. En este trabajo, examinamos los mecanismos internos del lenguaje que transforman las unidades léxicas en unidades morfosintácticas, ya sea por su valor semántico, por su creatividad, por su expresividad o por su rutinización. Nuestro argumento básico es que la gramaticalización en NP no es inducida por el contacto, sino que se trata de un fenómeno interno de la lengua, lo que revela que el NP tiene una existencia tanto sincrónica como diacrónica, imprescindible en la evolución de su singular gramática.

Palabras clave: gramaticalización, pidgin nigeriano, lingüística de contacto, gramática, cambio semántico.

NP is a variety of the West African Creole, which has been traced to the 15th century along the coastal regions of Calabar, Port-Harcourt, Sapele, Warri, and Badagry among others. The upsurge of interest in slave trade brought about the earliest contact between the Europeans and Africans, and where there was no common medium of communication, the emergence of a pidgin language became apparent (Nair, 1972). The first recorded form of NP was documented by the famous Antera Duke, a prominent chief and trader in Old Calabar, who wrote mostly about the activities that transpired between the Efik and White trading partners and supercargoes along the Cross River Basin up to Bakassi in Southern Cameroon (Mensah, 2011). It is noted that the earliest contact of West African people with the Europeans was with the Portuguese in the 15th Century. This explains the presence of a pocket of Portuguese words in the lexicon of NP such as pikin ''child'', palaver ''problem'', dash ''gift'', sabi ''know'' etc. (Vanamali, 1993).

Antera Duke's documentation has come to be known as the Diary of Antera Duke (DAD). Fayer (1990) maintains that DAD provides evidence that the pidgin English used in Old Calabar was not just a spoken language but also had written functions. The diary also provided some of the earliest evidence of the pidgin that continues as Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) (p. 185). Unfortunately, a greater chunk of the diary was bombed at the library of the United Church of Scotland during the Second World War (Fayer, 1990).

NP started off as a language of business communication and with the passage of time, it expanded to other domains and functionalities. NP has English as the lexifier language, while other languages like French, Portuguese, and Nigeria's indigenous languages are the substrate source of lexical influence. In the developmental continuum of NP, a number of changes and innovations had taken place, which may either be contact-induced or self-renewing. One such change in the evolution of historical morphosyntax of NP is the acquisition of grammatical functions by lexical items which hitherto belonged to a categorical class and performed a lexical function (Traugott, 2004). Traugott (ibid) calls this phenomenon ''a shift from lexical to grammatical'' (p. 140) or from grammatical to further grammatical. In other words, lexical/grammatical items have undergone changes in use, meaning and form, and new forms and new functions have been assigned to them relative to the system (Vincent, 1995).

Grammaticalization has been described as a language-internal development and conceived as a slow, diachronic, progressive and unidirectional process (Hopper & Traugott, 1993; Miller, 2000; Traugott & Heine, 1991). In grammaticalization, synchronic realities are often explained in terms of diachronic changes. This paper discusses the grammaticalization of verbs, which function as tense markers, aspectual markers, auxiliary elements and complementizers as well as nouns which grammaticalize as plural markers. In the relevant literature on grammaticalization, no study has examined the phenomenon in NP either from a theoretical or exemplifying perspective. The present study, therefore, sets the tone to filling this conceptual gap by providing an analysis that would be of interest to scholars of grammaticalization and generative linguists. The paper is structured as follows: The next section examines the background on Calabar variety of NP which is the reference point for the present study. Section 3 deals with the grammaticalization of verbs, Section 4 is the grammaticalization of prepositions, Section 5 examines the grammaticalization of nouns. Section 6 is the summary of findings, and provides further perspectives for future research.

Data for the study were obtained through recording of natural occurring speech of speakers of a variety of NP spoken in Calabar, the capital city of Cross River State, South-Eastern Nigeria. This variety of NP is popularly called Una or Broken English. Fifty respondents or subjects within the age bracket of between 15 and 70 years were sampled randomly. Young people within the age range of between 15 and 35 constituted the largest population (52%) while middle-aged respondents (36-50 years) and elderly respondents (51-70 years) respectively constituted 25% and 23% of the total respondents studied. 70% of the respondents (35) were males while the remaining 30% were females. The preponderance of young people was based on their creative and innovative use of NP. They have a way of generating the relevant data without being prompted unlike other categories of respondents. The data were mainly obtained in schools, university campuses, homes, markets and other conversational contexts and involved a wide range of subjects –politics, religion, commerce, economy, education, labour etc.

Eighteen of the respondents speak NP as a second language, representing 36%, while 32 of them, representing 64%, speak NP as a third language. This variable also gives a clue to the educational background of the respondents. Those who speak NP as a second language are not literate in English (formal education), while those who have it as the third tongue may have graduated from either a higher school or the university. 15% of the respondents were elites like university professors, administrators, highly revered clergymen, etc. 60% were the middle class which includes teachers, civil servants, pensioners, farmers, etc. and 25% were artisans, bus conductors and motor park touts. We also employed participant observation as a primary method for the research. A digital recorder was used to store the corpus of grammaticalized speech. Four hours of recording were done in the field. The data which were transcribed and annotated formed the basis of our analysis.

A number of varieties of NP have been recognised in literature such as Wafi, spoken predominantly in Warri and Sapele (Marchese & Schnukal, 1982), Ajegunle, spoken in Lagos and its environs ( Jowitt, 1991), Una, the Calabar variety, spoken in Southern Cross River State (Mensah, 2011) and Special English, the varieties spoken in Port- Harcourt and Onitsha, etc. A generally known feature of all these varieties is that they developed in highly linguistically heterogenous settings. They are also mutually intelligible but each has its peculiar social and morphosyntactic idiosyncrasies which make it stand out as a distinct variety. The Warri variety is believed to be the most versatile and creative of all the varieties of NP (Marchese & Schnukal, 1982; Mensah, 2011). It contributes the highest amount of slang which eventually gains currency and becomes conventionalised in the lexicon of their variety of NP and beyond. Such newly invented entries in the Warri variety include efizy ''style'', káwásáki ''leave quickly'', strafe ''sexual intercourse'', ákátá ''an African-American'' and gbósá ''loud noise'', etc. These lexical items have socially invented meanings which gradually spread to the other varieties. The Ajegunle variety is highly influenced by Yoruba slang such as egunje ''bribe'', tokumbo ''second hand-rated goods'', òròbò ''an extremely fat person'', lékpá ''a very thin person (usually a female)'', ásháwó ''a prostitute'', ibeji ''twins'' etc. The Onitsha variety is partly influenced by Igbo's (its predominant speakers) commercialism and trade slang. Words and expressions like nyàkìrì ''dishonest transaction'', buy market ''be in trouble'', bad market ''worthless goods items'', etc. are commonplace and contribute to the resourcefulness and lexical enrichment of NP.

Una, the Calabar variety of NP, is a fairly stable variety which evolved with the advent of NP during the pre-colonial era in Nigeria (Elugbe & Omamor, 1991). It spreads to the entire South- Eastern part of the country due to the influx of traders with diverse linguistic backgrounds (e.g. Igbo, Ekoi, Agwagune, Ugep, Obubra etc.) who were transacting business along the West African coast. English is the chief donor language (superstrate) while Efik is the primary substrate lexical influence in addition to other pre-colonial Nigerian languages like Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. Efik, English and NP exist in a diglossic relationship within the urban sociolinguistic ecology. This variety is mainly coloured by the Efik lexemes and calque forms which give it its distinctive character. A number of metaphors and metonym in this variety demonstrates the indigenous languages influence as our data could reveal:

1.

kóp nó mí (lit. listen to me) - love portion
ínwáñ (lit. farm) - a foolish person
útóñ (lit. ear) - a mobile handset
kwat nkpe (lit. scratch and pay)- a prostitute
dry die - HIV/AIDS
cry die - mourning
yansh man - a homosexual
yansh babe - a lesbian

Another important form of the influence of the indigenous language on this variety is its combination with English through blending to create lexical items by semantic association as we can see in 2:

2.

úbók gum (hand/gum) - a mean or selfish person
sáí monkey (roamy monkey) - (lit.) a thief
tíñ ké church (say in/church) - stop nagging (lit. testify, confess)

There is also the juxtaposition of elements from two lexical items (clipping) in English to create a word. This is mainly for aesthetic and comic effects as the data in 3 show:

3.

fantabullous (fantastic/fabulous)
overgasted (overwhelmed/flabbergasted)
flabberwhelmed (flabbergasted/overwhelmed)
carnibration (carnival/celebration)
edutainment (education/entertainment)
terrubious (terrible/dubious)

This kind of coinage has also gained currency in other varieties of NP and particularly in Keggite's (a social network group made up of undergraduate students) communication. It is, however, noted that it is somehow more common in the Una variety than in others, though they may not originally have been coined in this variety.

An interesting feature of NP is that it is gradually acquiring affixes, and thus developing a complex morphological system. For instance, words like misyarn, misfire, blacky, shorty, etc. are in the lexicon of NP and function to bring out contrastive meaning, and emphatic meaning. The illustrations in 3 naturally would be considered to be ''grammar'' by the speakers of NP (i.e., high sounding and embellished words) and would be simplified to less complicated forms in NP natural discourse. However, they are mainly used to create humour and achieve maximum comic effect. Elugbe and Omamor (1991) describe such creations as a substandard attempt by a large proportion of illiterate Nigerians ill-equipped to manipulate the English language. Mensah (2011) refers to such forms as a feature of Pidgin English which he rightly distinguishes from Nigerian Pidgin.

An important morphophonemic fact about the Calabar variety of NP is that it does not distinguish homophones. Though this is a general feature of NP, the Calabar variety seems to be a little more dynamic creating homophones from both superstrate and substrate sources. Words like thing, thin, tin are pronounced [tin]. Forms like sight, site and cite would be [sait] while write, right and rite may be [rait] etc. The reason for this discrepancy is that the relationship between sound and spelling is much more stable in NP than in English. The phonological reduction of codas and the neutralization of phonemes lead to greater number of homophones in NP than in metropolitan English. Although no variety of any language distinguishes homophones phonetically. The NP sounds match their corresponding letters in a direct and more faithful one-on-one relation. It is true that there is no generally accepted orthography for NP, hence, each writer prefers a writing system that is a true reflection of the sound. The only way to distinguish homophones in NP is with suprasegmental features like tone and intonation, non-linguistic features like gestures and mimicry as well as the context of discourse as we can see in the data in 4 and 5:

4.

1. Pálè no gree me come.
   
   pale NEG gree me come
   (My) father didn't allow me to come.
   
   
2. De pálè bin dey misyarn una.
   DET pale PAST PROG misyarn you (PL)

5.

1. Chelsea bin waya Arsenal well.
   Chelsea PAST waya Arsenal well
   Chelsea defeated Arsenal glaringly.
   
   
2. Jossy carry de waya troway.
   Jossy carry DET waya troway
   Jossy threw away the wire.

The homophones pálè father/friends in 4 and waya in defeat/wire in 5 can only be distinguished contextually. They are phonetically and orthographically identical and both pairs can be used in lexical decision task to investigate word recognition (Martin, 1982).

The Calabar variety allows a much greater degree of multifunctionality of lexical items in which case, a lexical item can belong to more than one grammatical class or part of speech in agreement with Muhlhausler (2008, p. 81) who states that the elimination of many formal distinctions between word classes is to be expected in any mixed language. In this regard, we examine two lexical items, runs and toronto which can function as nouns, transitive and intransitive verbs and adjectives:

6. As nouns

E dey do runs.
3SG PRES do runs
She is into prostitution.

E be real toronto.
3SG be real toronto
He' s a real cheat.

7. As adjectives

E be runs babe.
3SG be runs babe
She is a smart girl (given to prostitution).

Wer de toronto boy?
Q DET toronto boy
Where is the fake boy?

8. As transitive verbs

E dey runs pay fees.
3SG PRES runs pay fees
She does prostitution to pay her fees.

You no fit toronto me.
2SG NEG AUX toronto me
You cannot deceive me.

9. As intransitive verbs

E dey runs.
3SG PRES runs
She prostitutes very well.

Me dey toronto.
1SG PRES toronto
I deceive people a lot.

Where these forms are used as verbs without cognate objects as in 9, a pragmatic reading is required to interpret the intensity of the action described by the verb. The verb emphasises the degree to which the action is performed. The examples in 6-9 reveal that the same words can be used freely as different parts of speech, where no formal distinction can be made between a noun, verb and adjective.

From the perspective of morphosyntax, the Calabar variety exhibits the presence of tense but also predominant loss of inflectional and derivational morphology which is a feature of pidgin languages. The most striking syntactic peculiarity of this variety is that some speakers use the objective singular personal pronoun me for both the subjective and objective positions as well as the objective plural personal pronoun we for both the subjective and objective positions as we can see in 10:

10.

1. Me wan follow come.
   1SG want follow come
   I want to come as well
   
   
2. Una no dey follow me.
   2PL NEG PRES follow pro
   You cannot come with me

11.

1. We wan follow come
   1PL want follow come
   We want to come as well
   
   
2. Una no dey follow we
   2PL NEG PRES follow pro
   You cannot follow us

It is, however, noted that the use of the first person subjective pronoun I is more productive than me just as the use of us is more marked than we as an objective personal pronoun in this variety. The reason is because pidgin languages are not very systematic. The use of me and we as the corresponding markers for both the objective and subjective cases do not impose selectional restrictions on the assignment of theta roles to either the external argument (subject noun phrase) and internal argument (object noun phrase). This is a morphosyntactic fact about person/number agreement that is also found in other varieties particularly the Ikom variety where it predominates. For the purpose of this study and reason of consistency, we shall adopt the use of I for the first person singular subjective pronoun instead of me. Generally, the sources of all the features of Calabar variety of NP being catalogued here are as follows:

(i) directly from an indigenous language (Efik).

(ii) other varieties of NP and metropolitan English.

(iii) an organic process of evolution which pertain to pidgin languages (the notorious ''simplification'' or ''resetting to default'' claim [Bikerton, 1984])

In the following discussion, we describe how NP verbs undergo grammaticalization.

A number of lexical verbs in NP have undergone changes in use, form, meaning and function in the historical development of NP. In this way, grammaticalization can be seen as the gradual historical development of function morphemes from content morphemes (Fintel, 1995). Some verbs undergo changes from lexemes to auxiliaries, complementizers and tense while others encode temporal constituency of a situation. In the ensuing discussion, we examine the syntax of each verb as a grammatical marker in NP.

3.1 The grammaticalization of say and make

Say is a verb of communication, and it focuses on the communication of a message by a subject rather than illocutionary force. It has an agentive subject and a direct object or a recipient as its subcategorization requirements as illustrated in 12:

12

1. Oga say e wan see you.
   master say 3SG want see pro
   Master says (that) he wants to see you
   
   
2. I say you be mumu.
   1SG say 2SG COP fool
   I am saying (that) you are a fool

As a verb in NP, say has retained its expressive value, functional significance and meaning and is quite dynamic and immutable as in 12. Say functions as the head of the predicate phrase in the matric clause. The noun in the subordinate clause is in identity with the noun in the matrix clause which it modifies. The noun in the subordinate clause is prenominalised overtly by that. The verb say, however, has talk and yarn as its near synonymies as we can see in 13:

13

1. Wetin you dey talk?
   Q 2SG PROG talk
   What are you saying?
   
   
2. Wetin me yarn be ....
   Q ISG yarn be
   What I am saying is ....

Yarn, however, is a Wafi slang that is mostly used when one is asking another to tell him/her about what had happened or when one wants to acquaint another with what had happened as in 14:

14

1. Yarn me the tin wey happen.
   yarn me DET tin DET happen
   Tell me the thing that happened
   
   
2. Make I yarn you the tin wey I see.
   Make 1SG yarn 2SG DET tin DET 1SG see
   Let me tell you the thing that I saw

One cannot use say in the contexts of 14 (a) and (b), rather, another verb of communication, tell is implied. From the examples in 13, it is evident that the lexical items talk and yarn form a semantic cluster in which say can be substituted. It has been established that talk has a closer semantic relationship to say than yarn. We can therefore say that say does have a statable lexical meaning as a verb and can also function as a complementizer. This justifies Nicolle's (2007, p. 49) claim that lexical source constructions may also continue to be used concurrently with the gram that derives from it:

15

1. You think say me dey craze?
   2SG think COMP ISG PRES craze
   Do you think (that) I am crazy?
   
   
2. Chairman wan see say you do am well
   Chairman want see COMP 2SG do it well
   (The) boss wants to ensure (that) you do it wel

Structurally, the complementizer say is closely associated with the main verb which it modifies. From 15, while the complementizer may be an optional element in English, it is a mandatory subcategorization requirement of the sentence in NP. Millar (2007) argues that historically, complement constructions are syntactically entirely independent. This implies that they existed as separate sentences and in the passage of time, the two sentences were combined into one and the demonstrative was reduced to a mere grammatical particle. Say functions as the head of the subordinate clause or complentizer phrase. It places emphasis on the complement of the sentence by preposing it to the focus position. The complementizer is subcategorized for the verb, hence, is the head of the embedded or complement clause. The notion of subcategorization is important here because not all verbs in NP can choose say as their complements: