![]() These preliminary studies formed the bedrock for formulating an orthography for the language. A study of aspects of word formation in the language was also conducted. This included aspects of the phonetics and phonology of the language. As pre-requisite for identifying a writing system for Ọ̀sọ́sọ̀, a study of its sound system was conducted. The aim of this study is to close the gap created by the dearth of empirical studies on the language. This work is a proposed orthography for the Ọsọsọ language. Therefore, Nigerian Pidgin English is a part of language contact zone which represents one linguistic area in multilingual region of West Africa. The similarities between languages, (at the level of phonology, lexicon and structural properties of various kinds) are not due to their common descent, but to intensive language contact. The comparison of Nigerian Pidgin English structures with similar patterns of the main languages of the area indicates that all these languages contribute to each other in the process of their individual development. It is a contact language which shares numerous structural similarities with the languages of the area which make its substratum. The analysis indicates that Nigerian Pidgin English should not be perceived only as a result of simplification of the source language which is given a status of ‘broken English’. The questions of grammaticalization resulting in the change of lexical units to grammatical units was subject of a particular interest. ![]() ![]() However, the work was not oriented at establishing the systemic properties of the language but rather aimed to distinguish features influenced by the African languages which function as its linguistic substrate. The language is in the process of ongoing development and structural properties are manifested differently in texts representing the language from different zones of Nigeria and created in different times. It deals with the phonological representation, the patterns of expressing grammatical categories and the rules of word formation leading to creating new units. The dissertation presents the analysis of Nigeria Pidgin English at various levels of the language structure. it was also concluded that the Nigerian English-based pidgin is a distinct language and not a dialect of the English language. It was also discovered that verbs in the Nigerian English-based pidgin do not inflect to show tense, and that some indigenous Nigerian languages contribute to the word stock of the Nigerian English-based pidgin words form adjectives through the process of reduplication. From an examination of the corpus, the following findings were made: the Nigerian English-based pidgin forms its plural by the placement of an independent particle, the agentive morpheme. Some extracts from the United Nations Information Handbooks were also added to the collection. Also, some words and expression were collected from a novel entitled Sozaboy written by a Nigerian author, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who uses the Nigerian English-based pidgin in his writings. The data used in this research reflect the linguistic backgrounds of the Nigerian people and also show how their languages help in constituting the word stock in English-based pidgin. The corpus-based research method was used to identify the word formation processes of the Nigerian English-based pidgin, examine the concept of creativity in relation the Nigerian English-based pidgin, to suggest a unified spelling system for English-based pidgin words, and to compile a corpus of English-based pidgin words in circulation. This is a research into the word formation processes of the Nigerian English-based pidgin.
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