Quirks of resumption in Cameroon Pidgin English

This squib is a contribution to the typology of ϕ-feature (mis-)matching in resumption, using data from the English-lexifier pidgin spoken in Cameroon. I demonstrate that Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) has movement and base-generation resumptive pronouns (RPs). Unlike base-generation RPs, movement RPs show a number-gender mismatch with lexical object XP foci, and a number-gender-person mismatch with pronominals. I relate this to the recent literature and argue that, empirically, number-gender-person mismatches are attested within a single language and, theoretically, the CPE data are compatible with copy-deletion (Van Urk 2018; Scott 2021; Georgi & Amaechi 2023; Yip & Ahenkorah 2023) and impoverishment (Ershova 2024; Fongang 2025) approaches to movement RPs.