WEY and the structure of relative clauses in Nigerian Pidgin English

Abstract A comprehensive corpus-driven account of the internal structure, meaning and interpretation of relative clauses in Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) is missing in the literature. Relativisation, including its process, strategies, constraints, structural patterning, meaning and interpretation, is an important syntactic structure in any language, and therefore is crucial to our understanding of the extent to which syntactic and semantic structures in NPE differ from standard varieties of English. Relying on corpus material extracted from a popular web media outlet BBC News Pidgin, the study shows that user/speakers of NPE are cognitively enabled and creative in varying relative clauses along simple and complex choices and that structural and semantic complexities operative in the relativisation process in NPE are not too different from standard Englishes. Unlike in standard English where relativisers who and which clearly relate to the animacy of the relativised NP, relativiser representing wey, which can be classified as a prototype for relativisers weh, wen, and wia, does not clearly make such distinction. Also, it is shown that wey embodies the syntactic and semantic properties of these other relativisers, a phenomenon classified as relativiser reduction.