Cameroon

This paper presents an initial analysis of the Jimi verb phrase based on field data collected via WhatsApp over six months in 2021. The Jimi language is a thriving minority language spoken in the Far North of Cameroon by several thousand people. Even though the verb root in Jimi is quite simple and there is a lack of verbal inflection, the verb phrase is quite complex. The preverbal person-TAM agreement complex, intransitive copy pronouns, indirect object suffixes, prepositions that select the possessive suffix form, and many other features, including two word orders, are consistent with data from other Central Chadic languages. In addition to a brief overview of the verb phrase and word order, I present a preliminary analysis of linking in Jimi. The Jimi language shows no system of case marking, but there are a small number of prepositions and two linkers, ɗə and ka, which are productive function words filling a wide range of syntactic roles within the verb phrase and the sentence at large, such as introducing complements and adjuncts as well as in coordination and subordination.