Later on, they found it difficult―practically impossible―to communicate with the indigenes and so, they had no choice but to lift this ban and use Pidgin for their colonisation programme. When the Germans arrived in 1884, Pidgin was a fully developed language and, to check its spread, they put a ban on its use. When trade shifted from slaves to manufactured goods, this same language continued to be used and this went on from 1800 to 1884. It is a language that came into being in Cameroon during the Slave Trade years (1400-1800), and it was the only language in which Slave traders and the indigenes communicated. This paper is a linguistic analysis of proverbs in Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), a variant of West African Pidgins spoken along the West Coast of Africa from Ghana down to Cameroon. This is one of the structural features of Cameroon Pidgin that obviously does not come from the superstrate English seemingly, it does not come from the substrate Cameroon indigenous languages either. Another the-matisation technique is clefting, where the element “na” (it is… that) reproduc-es an earlier sentence constituent and introduces a relative clause in an other-wise simple sentence. While the position of relative clauses is fixed, that of adverbial clauses is mobile and as a result, cases of fronting are common. Complex sentence proverbs usually contain adverbial and relative clauses. The SVO and SVC clause patterns are dominant in simple sentences and so are positive structures as opposed to negative ones in the whole corpus. The analysis, which is done following Quirk et al.’s model of syntactic study, reveals that simple sentences occur more frequently than compound and complex sentences, with compound sentences being very limited in number. The data are drawn from a sample of proverbs which seem to have originated from the context of use of the language itself and are therefore not translations from foreign languages and cultures. This paper examines the structure of Cameroon Pidgin English proverbs.
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