The autonomy of CamE phonology and the concept of Trilateral Process

The CamE accent, though still intelligible to mother tongue accents to a large extent, is markedly different from several points of views. In fact it has reached a very high degree of autonomy. This autonomy, as amply demonstrated and exemplified notably in Simo Bobda (1994), is seen in the restructuring of the sound system of mother tongue English. This restructuring results in the numerous and major splits and mergers of Wells’ (1982) lexical sets. Autonomy is also seen in the way CamE applies existing phonological rules and, above all, in the application of its own sui generis rules.

The concept of “Trilateral Process”, proposed by Simo Bobda (1994) and discussed further by Simo Bobda and Chumbow (1999), best illustrates the autonomy of Cameroon English. According to this concept, the underlying representations of mother tongue segments A are restructured to new CamE underlying representations B; while the underlying representations A undergo mother tongue English phonological rules to yield the surface representation A^I, the CamE underlying representations B may undergo their own independent phonological rules or surface unchanged as B^I. For example, RP s [Λ] cceed is restructured to CamE underlying representation s [ɔ] cceed. While RP s [Λ] cceed undergoes Vowel Reduction to become s[ə]cceed, the CamE underlying representation surfaces unchanged as s [ɔ] cceed. A second example is RP underlying representation veg[ε]tate, restructured to CamE underlying representation veg[ε]tate; while RP veg[ε]tate undergoes Vowel Reduction to surface as veg [ɪ] tate, the CamE underlying representation veg[ε]tate does not undergo Vowel Reduction; in contrast, it undergoes E-Tensing and surfaces as veg[e]tate.

One example with consonants is the occurrence of [ʃ] (for RP [Ʒ]) in words like conclu /ʃ/ ion, divi /ʃ/ ion, inva /ʃ/ ion, revi /ʃ/ ion, as seen above. Seen through the Trilateral Process, [ʃ] can be traced from an underlying /d/ or /z/ changing to /s/ through autonomous CamE rules, before becoming [ʃ] through the application of existing rules of English phonology.

Tracing thus the peculiarities of CamE phonology to their underlying representations seems more rewarding than previous analyses based solely on surface forms; indeed, in the above examples, surface analysis would have limited itself to showing that RP /ə/, /ɪ/ and /Ʒ/ are replaced in s[ə]cceed, veg /ɪ/ tate and conclu /Ʒ/ ion by [ɔ] , [e] and [ʃ], respectively.