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Serial verb constructions in Kamtok (Cameroon Pidgin English)

Kamtok relies on SVCs to express concepts of location, valency increase, aspect and degree

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2016

Miriam Ayafor
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Extract

Kamtok, an English-based expanded pidgin/creole in Cameroon, has many of the grammatical structures of its lexifier language. However, there are certain grammatical structures in this contact language which are not so obvious in its lexifier, though they may exist sparingly in spoken forms of the production of some native speakers. One of these is the serial verb construction (SVC). SVCs are ‘a series of two (or more) verbs [that] have the same subject and are not joined by a conjunction … or a complementiser … as they would be in European languages (Holm, 1988: 183).

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 49 - 56
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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