Deuber (2006) investigated variation in spoken Nigerian Pidgin data by educated speakers and found no evidence for a continuum of lects between Nigerian Pidgin and English. Many speakers, however, speak both languages, and both are in close contact with each other, which keeps the question of the nature of their relationship on the agenda. This paper investigates 67 conversations in Nigerian English by educated speakers as they occur in the International Corpus of English, Nigeria (ICE-Nigeria, Wunder et al. 2010), using the variability in copula usage as a test bed. Implicational scaling, network analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis reveal that the use of variants is not randomly distributed over speakers. Particular clusters of speakers use particular constellations of variants. A qualitative investigation reveals this complex situation as a continuum of style, with codeswitching as one of the stylistic devices, motivated by such social factors as formality, setting, participants and interpersonal relationships.

中文翻译：

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尼日利亚英语和尼日利亚皮钦语在尼日利亚的关系：来自冰尼日利亚 Copula 结构的证据

Deuber (2006) 调查了受过教育的说话者在尼日利亚 Pidgin 口语数据中的变化，并没有发现尼日利亚 Pidgin 和英语之间的连续学习的证据。然而，许多发言者会说两种语言，而且双方都保持着密切的联系，这使得他们关系的性质问题一直被提上议事日程。本文调查了受过教育的演讲者在尼日利亚国际英语语料库中进行的 67 次尼日利亚英语对话（ICE-Nigeria, Wunder 等人，2010 年），使用 copula 使用的可变性作为测试平台。隐含缩放、网络分析和层次聚类分析表明，变体的使用不是随机分布在说话者身上的。特定的说话者集群使用特定的变体星座。