Towards a grammar of Chinese Pidgin English
supported by the Committee on Research and Conference Grants,
University of Hong Kong
Investigators: Stephen
Matthews, Linguistics Department, HKU
Geoff P. Smith, English Centre, University of Hong Kong
Umberto Ansaldo, University of Amsterdam
Summary
The project seeks to develop a gramatical sketch of the grammatical structure
of Chinese Pidgin English (CPE). In particular the work will evaluate the
role of Cantonese as substrate language. Grammatical issues to be addressed
include:
1. Use of personal pronouns (my wanchee vs. me wanchee vs. I wanchee)
2. Presence vs absence of wh-movement (you pay me what offer vs. you
pay me what offer)
3. Placement of prepositional phrases and time adverbials (we tomorrow
makee move)
4. Null subjects and objects (must likey or no likey)
5. Use of have/hab as an auxiliary (have bring rice this voyage?)
The work also aims to provide analyses of the grammatical functions
of key words such as 'long' as a comitative preposition (do littee pidgeon
long you) and 'make' as a ‘dummy’ or light verb (I makee mendee).These
usages do not suggest Cantonese influence, but have typological and possibly
historical parallels in other contact languages of the Pacific region such
as Tok Pisin which have been studied by the co-investigators. These parallels
will be addressed with particular attention to the respective roles of
historical contacts between contact languages and typological factors.
The findings will be published in a book on the history and structure of
Chinese Pidgin English to be co-edited by the investigators.
Background
In a project funded by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
the researchers have completed a transcription of a major new source for
Chinese Pidgin English (CPE), the ‘Chinese-English Instructor’ by Tong
King-Shu (1862) in which Pidgin English is represented in Chinese characters
(Li et al. 2005). This new data set complements existing data sets derived
from English-language sources, which suffer from well-known problems of
reliability. Together, the Chinese and English sources make it possible
to attempt a grammatical sketch of this extinct contact language. While
the historical context of CPE is relatively well understood (Selby and
Selby 1995, Bolton 2003), investigations of its structure have been hampered
by the limited and unreliable nature of the sources. Even basic issues
such as the role of the Cantonese substrate remain poorly understood, and
not even an overall sketch of the grammar exists. The project aims to produce
such a sketch for the first time. The analyses will contribute to the field
of pidgin and creole linguistics where relatively little is known about
the structure of CPE, and substrate influence in general remains a controversial
issue. The work will also enrich the teaching of courses in Language Contact
taught by the investigators, courses for which CPE data are of particular
local relevance.
Research plan and methodology
The two data sources, (a) the newly transcribed Chinese source and (b)
a corpus of English-language attestations compiled by Philip Baker will
be compared systematically in qualitative and quantitative terms. Qualitatively,
we will establish which structures are attested in one source or the other,
e.g. whether prepositional phrases preceding the verb (‘my long you makee
alla proper’) under Cantonese influence are found only in the Chinese sources.
Quantitative issues involve the proportions of various alternative structures
in each source: for example, for each type of wh-question (‘what’, ‘how
muchee’, etc.), the percentage of wh-movement (‘what time he go?’) vs.
wh in situ (‘he go what time?’) needs to be established in order to evaluate
the extent of substrate influence. Preliminary fundings on these questions
have been presented by the investigators at conferences in Leiden and Leipzig
in 2005.
Li, Michelle, Stephen Matthews and Geoff Smith. Pidgin English texts
from the Chinese English Instructor. In G.P.Smith & S. Matthews
(eds), Chinese Pidgin English: Texts and Contexts. Special
Issue of the Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics (September
2005), 79-167.