A Corpus of Chinese Pidgin English
Introduction
Chinese Pidgin English was a trade pidgin emerged around the 18th century (Tryon, Mühlhäusler & Baker 1996). It served as a lingua franca for interethnic communication, especially among Chinese and Europeans. The pidgin originated in Canton which was the only port opened for foreign trade in the eighteenth century. As a result of the Opium Wars, more treaty ports along the China Coast were opened for foreign trade. At the same time, Chinese Pidgin English began to spread to cities such as Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou), Shanghai and Ningpo (Ningbo). Throughout its ca. 250 years of use, CPE remained a functionally restricted pidgin until its extinction around the 1960s.
The lexicon of CPE mainly consists of English vocabulary. There are, however, a number of vocabulary items of different origins, for example savvy ‘know’ from Portuguese, units of measurement such as catty and candareen from Malay, chop ‘seal, trade mark’ from Hindi. CPE lacks inflectional morphology and is basically a SVO language. The grammar of Chinese Pidgin English shows considerable influence from Cantonese in areas such as the use of the classifier piecee, serial verb constructions, topicalization, wh-in-situ questions, and the preposition long (Hall 1944; Baker 1987; Baker & Mühlhäusler 1990; Shi 1991; Bolton 2003; Ansaldo, Matthews & Smith 2010; Li 2011, Matthews & Li 2012).
The Corpus of Chinese Pidgin English, supported by a UGC funding (UGC/FDS11/H01/18), is a collection of data of Chinese Pidgin English in Chinese and English language sources.
References
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