SOME DISTINCTIVE LEXICO-SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC FEATURES IN NIGERIAN PIDGIN ENGLISH: CASE STUDY OF WOLE SOYINKA’S THE BEATIFICATION OF AREA BOY: A LAGOSIAN KALEIDOSCOPE

Abstract

Abstract: The unparalleled closeness of language with human beings makes it to be reshuffled, reshaped and continually adapted to the speakers’ cultures, encounters, communicative needs, as well as their social and occupational statuses. The thirst of uncovering the many different linguistic workings behind the Nigerian Pidgin English thus ignited this scientific venture as a search for the distinctive lexico-semantic and syntactic features at work in this lingua franca. This goal has been achieved within the theoretical backdrop of languages in contact through a descriptive analysis applied to some extracts from Wole Soyinka’s The Beatification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope, published in 1995. The qualitative method adopted along the descriptive analysis made its way through an overview of the existence and use of Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE), the identification and coding of NPE instances from the corpus, a comparative NPE and Standard English approach for a search of the underpinning linguistic workings in this English language variety. This research process has proved much conclusive with the finding of cases of semantic broadening, reduction and/or deletion of graphemes, phonemes, inflectional morphemes, borrowings, phonological substitutions, as well as speech parts substitutions. The subsequent scientific furthering that has followed these outcomes revealed the presence of the least effort principle and the sociolect of school dropouts and uneducated people as the main sociolinguistic justifications to the aforementioned linguistic workings. These results came as a proof of the constitutive feature of the NPE. Keywords: Language contact, Nigerian Pidgin English, lexico-semantic and syntactic analysis, Wole Soyinka.