IGBOSCHOLARS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF IGBO SCHOLARS FORUM, NIGERIA

This study was carried out to illustratively analyse the verb phrase (VP) of Basic Nigerian Pidgin Sentence because studies have revealed that pidgin which may surpass the three major languages of Nigeria (Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba) in terms of population of speakers is not recognized as a“language” because it is yet to be standardized. At this juncture, it is pertinent to state that the basis for accepting Nigerian Pidgin (and perhaps all pidgins) as a language should be in the facility of its usage by all. In order to achieve the aforementioned goal, both live pidgin utterances and written samples were randomly collected through the library and field research methods. For the analysis, basic Chomskyean phrase structure rules as propounded in 1957 and 1965 that analyse utterances in terms of their syntactic constituents were adopted as the theoretical framework. At the end of the exercise, findings revealed that though, Nigerian Pidgin has limited vocabulary drawn from the English language (lexifier/superstrate), it (Nigerian Pidgin) has a system that can be described coherently just like the English language or any other language.

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