Uncompleted Aspect Marking from Standard English to Nigerian Pidgin: A Comparative Study

Jacqueline Siamba Gabrielle DIOMANDÉ-KÉITA

Numéro 13 – RILE-1 de 2019 (Premier numéro 2019) (2019) Page(s) 115 - 126 ISSN 2076-6130

Uttering involves using grammatical markers, that is, markers of tense, aspect and modality. Specific grammatical forms are used and marked operation types the utterer carries out. The aim of this paper is to highlight the complexity of uncompleted aspect marking from Standard English to Nigerian Pidgin and conversely. Basing on A. Culioli’s “theory of enunciative operations,” this paper analyses be+ing as uncompleted marker, identifies its NP equivalents and accounts for their use. NP markers involved in this uncompleted aspect marking process are presented as sufficiently different from SE be+ing; they are markers driving meanings by themselves and do not lend themselves to some language games as their SE equivalent would. Keywords: Nigerian Pidgin, reference, Standard English, uncompl 116 The aim of this paper is to highlight the complexity of uncompleted aspect1 marking from Standard English (SE) to Nigerian Pidgin (NP), and conversely. This raises some questions. How do SE and NP mark “uncompletedness”? Are SE and NP uncompleted aspectual forms identical, slightly different or completely different? Do they have the same referential value? Basing on A. Culioli’s enunciative operations theory, the paper suggests some answers by first recalling the concept of aspect, then identifying and comparing SE and NP uncompleted aspect verb forms. I. Defining Aspect For A. NIKLAS-SALMINEN, Descriptive grammars often define aspect as the way the utterer sees the action in its progress. This apparently simple definition, gets complicated when it comes to define the

Télécharger le PDF Ouvrir dans un nouvel onglet

Jacqueline Siamba Gabrielle DIOMANDÉ-KÉITA. « Uncompleted Aspect Marking from Standard English to Nigerian Pidgin: A Comparative Study ». Revue Ivoirienne de Langues Étrangères, Numéro 13, 2019, p. 115. ISSN 2076-6130.