Positional Prominence and Information Structure in Cameroon English: Nativised Grammatical Correlates in a New English

This paper examines the grammatical structures through which positional prominence is realised in Cameroon English (CamE), situated within the theoretical framework of New Englishes scholarship. Positional prominence refers to the use of sentence-initial syntactic position to signal what is topical, focal, or discourse-salient in an utterance. Four grammatical structures are identified as the primary realisations of this phenomenon in CamE: topicalization, left-dislocation with resumptive pronouns, cleft constructions, and focus fronting. Data drawn from a corpus of naturalistic spoken and written CamE (approximately 125,000 words) are used to demonstrate that these are not instances of non-standard usage but rule-governed, nativised features of an emergent endonormative grammar. The analysis draws on Lambrecht's (1994) information structure framework, Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model of postcolonial Englishes, and Mufwene's (2001) feature pool model. Substrate influence from Cameroonian indigenous languages, many of which are topic-prominent in the typological sense of Li and Thompson (1976), is identified as a conditioning factor in the development of these features. The paper contributes to the descriptive literature on African Englishes and advocates for the systematic inclusion of information-structural features in the grammatical documentation of CamE.