SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF PREPOSITIONS AND PRO-FORMS IN CAMEROON FRANCOPHONE ENGLISH

This paper examines the syntactic features of prepositions and pro-forms by Cameroon Francophone English (CamFE) users with a tertiary education level. Written and spoken data were drawn from 95 participants from various domains encompassing administration, education, sports, and politics. A corpus of 136,767 words was built and exploited following the corpus linguistics methodology. The AntConc analytical toolkit was used in sorting out data. Quirk and Greenbaum’s (1973) structural approach to grammar was used as the analytical framework to establish the common core features (CCFs) and the interfered features (IFs). It was found that the English by Francophone Cameroonians is characterised by features that drift away from the common core features. Items were inserted, substituted, anticipated, delayed or clustered. The French language has impacted those features in a considerable degree. The conclusion that is drawn from the analysis is that CamFE is a francophonised non-native variety of English in Cameroon.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0717/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>