Cameroon Pidgin English: A comprehensive grammar. By Ayafor, Miriam and Melanie J. Green

Abstract

Cameroon Pidgin English, by Miriam Ayafor and Melanie Green, is the latest and, as the subtitle ‘A comprehensive grammar’ suggests, most extensive work yet on the African English-lexifier creole language Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE). With two hundred and sixty-two pages of grammar and another sixteen pages of excellent texts, this book is indeed the most comprehensive treatment of the language. The core grammar sections of this book contain a wealth of information that creolists, contact linguists, and linguists working on African languages and English will be able to make ample use of. Ch. 7 (‘Tense, mood, modality, aspect and negation’), for example, contains a detailed table with all combinatorial possibilities of the tense-mood-aspect markers of CPE, and it contextualizes their use by providing many interesting example sentences. This book and the corpus on which it is based therefore constitute an important advance for the description and documentation of African (contact) languages.