Nominal serialization in Cameroonian pidgin

This paper claims that Cameroonian Pidgin employs the mechanism of serial noun constructions to derive nominal complementation, resumptive nominals, thematic restructuring, paratactic constructs and nominal reduplication. The paper investigates the binding and referential properties of precedence relations in serial noun constructions to determine the fields of anaphora within the system of pronouns and their thematic relationships. The paper demonstrates that though pronouns in the language may not overtly exhibit morphological variation relative to Case marking, there are nonetheless complex agreement relations between these pronouns. We examine the various nominal reduplication techniques and argue that reduplication constitutes one of the strategies employed by Cameroonian Pidgin to derive serial noun constructions just as it exploits it for lexical creation. We present contrary evidence to the claims by Schneider (1960, 1963 and 1967) that Cameroonian Pidgin is a mere deviant of Standard English and demonstrate that the language exhibits complex structures that are completely alien to Standard English. The paper claims that nominal serialization is Cameroonian Pidgin’s computational mechanism of achieving economic derivations in the like of Chomsky, (1995, 2000, and 2005).