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Journal articles on the topic 'Kwa Language'
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1
Fidler, Masako, and Václav Cvrček. "Keymorph analysis, or how morphosyntax informs discourse." Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 15, no. 1 (May 27, 2019): 39–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2016-0073.
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Abstract This paper introduces keymorph analysis (KMA), a new extension of the discourse-probing technique of keyword analysis (KWA). While KWA focuses on lexicon and provides a key predominantly to textual topics and their semantic associations, KMA focuses on morphosyntactic features and captures more general characteristics of texts as wholes. Speeches by Czech(oslovak) presidents and corpus of contemporary written Czech SYN2015 are used to illustrate readers’ perception of situations and their participants in these texts. The paper also shows that different levels of morphosyntax facilitate interpretation of discourse: ideological differences can be observed with higher-level morphosyntactic features (parts of speech), while differences in speaker style are observable with lower-level morphosyntactic features (case, number, person, and their combinations).
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Konoshenko, Maria, and Dasha Shavarina. "A microtypological survey of noun classes in Kwa." Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 40, no. 1 (July 26, 2019): 75–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jall-2019-0004.
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AbstractThis paper provides an overview of noun class systems in a sample of 20 Kwa languages. It focuses on the synchronic productivity of noun classification in Kwa as opposed to the full-fledged class system assumed for Proto-Kwa and for the general “Niger-Congo prototype” (Good, Jeff. 2012. How to become a “Kwa” noun.”Morphology22(2). 293–335; Creissels, Denis. Forthcoming. Noun class systems in Atlantic languages. To appear. In Friederike Lüpke (ed.),The Oxford guide to the Atlantic languages of West Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press). The productivity of class morphology on nouns is studied by exploring class marker alternations as exponents of other grammatical phenomena: the formation of the plural, diminutive derivation and nominalization. We also discuss class indexation on nominal modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives and indefinite markers) as well as subject and object pronominals. We demonstrate that Kwa languages tend to follow the typological tendencies pertaining to class marking on nouns and class indexation, e.g. the Agreement hierarchy (Corbett, Greville G. 1979. The agreement hierarchy.Journal of Linguistics15. 203–224), as established for world languages in general and Niger-Congo family in particular (Good, Jeff. 2012. How to become a “Kwa” noun.”Morphology22(2). 293–335). However, some intriguing discrepancies, e.g. different patterning of indexation on adjectives vs. on numerals in Kwa as opposed to some other Niger-Congo branches, were also attested. In diachronic perspective, our findings suggest that noun class systems are flexible as they show high intragenetic variation and are easily degradable, but they almost never disappear completely.
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Broohm, Obed Nii, and Chiara Melloni. "Mind your tones! The role of tonal morphology in Kwa action nominalization." Zeitschrift für Wortbildung / Journal of Word Formation 4, no. 2 (January 1, 2020): 36–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/zwjw.2020.02.03.
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Abstract In the typology of West African languages, tone has been noted to play crucial grammatical and lexical roles, but its function in word formation has been less systematically explored and remains to be fully understood. Against this backdrop, the present study seeks to examine the form and function of tonal morphology in the formation of action nominals in four Kwa languages spoken in Ghana, namely Akan, Ga, Lεtε, and Esahie, a relatively unexplored language of the Central Tano subgroup. Relying on data from both secondary and primary sources, we argue that tone raising is an important component of Kwa action nominalization, as it is found across different languages and derivational strategies. Specifically, while across the Kwa languages considered, tone raising tends to be an epiphenomenon of phonological conditioning, sometimes tone is the sole component of the nominalization operation or, as in Esahie, it concurs with the affix to the derivation, hence playing a morphological function.
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Good, Jeff. "How to become a “Kwa” noun." Morphology 22, no. 2 (March 21, 2012): 293–335. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11525-011-9197-2.
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Abunya, Levina Nyameye, Edward Owusu, and Faustina Marius Naapane. "A Comparative Study of the Simple Clause in Akan, Dagaare and English." Education and Linguistics Research 7, no. 1 (May 15, 2021): 62. http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/elr.v7i1.18353.
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The paper compares how the simple clause is expressed in Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo), Dagaare (Gur, Niger-Congo) and English. It examines the simple clause in relation to noun phrase, verbal phrases, adpositional phrases, basic word order in declarative and focus constructions, and the basic locative construction. Basically, the study reveals that despite the differences, Akan and Dagaare have a lot in common as compared to English. This of course shows how distant English is from the two African languages. Certain linguistic features such as serial verb construction and focus constructions were unique to Akan and Dagaare and this, is not surprising since languages within the same language family (Niger Congo) tend to share certain lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactic features. The significant variation between these languages shows where Akan and Dagaare languages diverge into other sub-family groups: Kwa and Gur, respectively.
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Renans, Agata. "Exclusive Particles in Ga (Kwa)." Journal of Semantics 34, no. 4 (July 14, 2017): 555–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffx005.
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Rivera-Castillo, Yolanda. "Language Typology and Tonogenesis in Two Atlantic Creoles." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 28, no. 1 (August 14, 2002): 281. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v28i1.3843.
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This paper provides evidence of strong typological similarities between the tonal systems of Papiamentu and Saramaccan with the systems of West African languages. These typological similarities constitute the basis for a proposal that there is a genetic affiliation between Papiamentu and Saramaccan with the Kwa and Bantu language families; an affiliation that reaches beyond the accidental lexical borrowing. Since Saramaccan has been classified as an English-based Creole, and Papiamentu as a Romance-based Creole, their similarities indicate that their substrata have a greater significance in Creole genesis than previously recognized.
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Anderson, Coleen G. "ATR vowel harmony in Akposso." Studies in African Linguistics 28, no. 2 (June 15, 1999): 185–214. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v28i2.107372.
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This paper presents a description of the vowel harmony system of Akposso (Uwi), a Kwa language of Ghana and Togo, one of only a handful of Kwa languages with a complete ten vowel system with ATR harmony. However, the tenth vowel, hi, does not function as the harmonic counterpart of the low [-ATR] central vowel lal in affixes as it does in other ten vowel languages with crossheight vowel harmony systems. Rather, in some instances Ia! alternates with lei in [+ATR] contexts, while in other instances it surfaces invariably as lal in both [-ATR] and l +ATR] contexts. Formant measurements show the [+ATR] central vowel occupying the mid area of acoustic space, thus adding some support to the view that [+ATR] central vowels in ATR harmony systems are phonetically nonlow rather than low, the more widely-assumed position. Although vowel harmony applies to a significant number of affixes, especially in the verb morphology, there are interesting limitations on how far harmony extends.
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Raper, Peter E. "The Component Kwa- in Zulu Placenames Derived from Khoisan." Names 57, no. 3 (September 2009): 127–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/175622709x436350.
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Makeeva, Nadezhda, and Andrey Shluinsky. "Ditransitive constructions in Akebu." Studies in Language 44, no. 4 (October 23, 2020): 964–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.19068.shl.
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Abstract This paper contributes to the typology of ditransitive constructions. Akebu (Kwa, Ghana-Togo mountain, West Africa) has four strategies of alignment of ditransitive verbs, if both theme and recipient objects are expressed: a neutral strategy, a possessive-like strategy, a strategy with a pronominal reprise and a ‘take’ serial verb construction strategy. The possessive-like strategy that is most standard in Akebu is rare in a cross-linguistic perspective and has not been attested in other Kwa languages. The factors that license a certain strategy are person, number and noun class of the theme and recipient and the internal structure of the theme noun phrase.
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Huttar, George L. "Review of Aboh & Essegbey (2010): Topics in Kwa syntax." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 28, no. 1 (February 18, 2013): 193–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.28.1.11hut.
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Kropp Dakubu, M. E. "Review of Aboh & Essegbey (2010): Topics in Kwa syntax." Studies in Language 34, no. 2 (August 13, 2010): 442–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.34.2.10kro.
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Kwak, Joongchol. "Foreword." APTIF 9 - Reality vs. Illusion 66, no. 4-5 (November 20, 2020): 549. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/babel.00187.kwa.
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Huttar, George L., James Essegbey, and Felix K. Ameka. "Gbe and other West African sources of Suriname creole semantic structures." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 22, no. 1 (April 6, 2007): 57–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.22.1.05hut.
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This paper reports on ongoing research on the role of various kinds of potential substrate languages in the development of the semantic structures of Ndyuka (Eastern Suriname Creole). A set of 100 senses of noun, verb, and other lexemes in Ndyuka were compared with senses of corresponding lexemes in three kinds of languages of the former Slave Coast and Gold Coast areas, and immediately adjoining hinterland: (a) Gbe languages; (b) other Kwa languages, specifically Akan and Ga; (c) non-Kwa Niger-Congo languages. The results of this process provide some evidence for the importance of the Gbe languages in the formation of the Suriname creoles, but also for the importance of other languages, and for the areal nature of some of the collocations studied, rendering specific identification of a single substrate source impossible and inappropriate. These results not only provide information about the role of Gbe and other languages in the formation of Ndyuka, but also give evidence for effects of substrate languages spoken by late arrivals some time after the “founders” of a given creole-speaking society. The conclusions are extrapolated beyond Suriname to creole genesis generally.
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Renans, Agata. "A cross-categorial definite determiner: Evidence from Ga (Kwa)." Semantics and Linguistic Theory 26 (October 15, 2016): 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v26i0.3781.
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This paper contributes to the growing body of evidence that in a cross-linguistic perspective there are definite descriptions of categories other than NPs. Based on novel data from Ga, an under-researched language spoken in Ghana, the paper argues that the definite determiner lE marks overtly familiarity and uniqueness in both the nominal and the verbal domain. When lE attaches to the VP, it marks an event as definite. The paper shows that definiteness in the verbal domain not only exists but also has the same properties as in the nominal domain, pointing to further parallelism between both.
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Bogny, Yapo Joseph. "La réduplication des verbes monosyllabiques dans les langues kwa de Côte d’Ivoire." Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 26, no. 1 (January 20, 2005): 1–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jall.2005.26.1.1.
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Casali, Roderic F. "Contextual labialization in Nawuri." Studies in African Linguistics 21, no. 3 (December 1, 1990): 319–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v21i3.107430.
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A spectrographic investigation into the non-contrastive labialization of consonants before round vowels in Nawuri (a Kwa language of Ghana) supports the notion that this labialization is the result of a phonological, featurespreading rule and not simply an automatic transitional process. This assumption is further warranted in that it allows for a more natural treatment of some other phonological processes in the language. The fact that labialization before round vowels is generally not very audible is explained in terms of a principle of speech perception. A final topic addressed is the question of why (both in Nawuri and apparently in a number of other Ghanaian languages as well) contextual labialization does tend to be more perceptible in certain restricted environments.
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Guerini, Federica. "Review of Ameka & Kropp Dakubu (2008): Aspect and Modality in Kwa Languages." Studies in Language 33, no. 1 (January 9, 2009): 247–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.33.1.12gue.
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Amfo, Nana Aba Appiah. "Noun phrase conjunction in Akan." Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 20, no. 1 (March 1, 2010): 27–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/prag.20.1.02amf.
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Noun phrase conjunction in Akan (Niger-Congo, Kwa) is performed by placing a connective between two noun phrases, but there is some variation in the forms used in the major dialects. In the Twi dialects the connective is ne, but Fante speakers may use nye or na depending on whether a comitative or a coordinative interpretation is intended. This paper focuses on the historical origins of the noun phrase connective n(y)e in Akan. It suggests that Akan patterns with other sub-saharan African languages such as Ewe, Ga, Yoruba and Hausa, which have noun phrase connectives originating from comitative verbs. This suggestion is based on the morpho-semantics of these connectives. In addition, the paper demonstrates that the origin of the connective n(y)e could be further traced to an equative copula in the language. This conclusion is based on syntactic and semantic evidence available in the language and strengthened by the cross-linguistic tendency for copula verbs to develop into noun phrase connectives in a number of unrelated languages.
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Aboh, Enoch Oladé. "Clause Structure and Verb Series." Linguistic Inquiry 40, no. 1 (January 2009): 1–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/ling.2009.40.1.1.
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This article argues that in V1-XP-V2 and V1-V2-XP series, V1 merges in the functional domain of the lexical verb (V2). V2 introduces the (internal) argument and is embedded under an AspP whose head is endowed with an EPP feature. Surface word order variations in Kwa (and Khoisan) result from the EPP licensing that triggers V2-object inversion, sometimes followed by V2 movement past the shifted object.
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Dingemanse, Mark, Giovanni Rossi, and Simeon Floyd. "Place reference in story beginnings: A cross-linguistic study of narrative and interactional affordances." Language in Society 46, no. 2 (February 8, 2017): 129–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404516001019.
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AbstractPeople often begin stories in conversation by referring to person, time, and place. We study story beginnings in three societies and find place reference is recurrently used to (i) set the stage, foreshadowing the type of story and the kind of response due, and to (ii) make the story cohere, anchoring elements of the developing story. Recipients orient to these interactional affordances of place reference by responding in ways that attend to the relevance of place for the story and by requesting clarification when references are incongruent or noticeably absent. The findings are based on 108 story beginnings in three unrelated languages: Cha'palaa, a Barbacoan language of Ecuador; Northern Italian, a Romance language of Italy; and Siwu, a Kwa language of Ghana. The commonalities suggest we have identified generic affordances of place reference, and that storytelling in conversation offers a robust sequential environment for systematic comparative research. (Storytelling, place, narrative, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics)*
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Paster, Mary. "The verbal morphology and phonology of Asante Twi." Studies in African Linguistics 39, no. 1 (June 1, 2010): 78–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v39i1.107285.
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This paper presents an analysis of the verbal morphology and associated phonological processes in Asante Twi, a member of the Akan group of languages/dialects spoken in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which belongs to the Nyo subgroup of the Kwa language family (Lewis 2009). There has been considerable interest in Akan in the theoretical literature, largely due to some peculiarities in the tense/aspect system which will be addressed later in this paper. However, the verbal morphology and phonology have been given relatively little attention. In this paper I show that the verbal morphology exhibits a number of interesting properties including tonal marking of tense/aspect categories – the latter having been largely ignored or misrepresented in the previous literature.
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Friday-Otun, Joseph Omoniyi. "The Study of Reduplication and Retriplication in the Yoruba Language." Journal of Language and Literature 21, no. 1 (March 16, 2021): 198–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.24071/joll.v21i1.2933.
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The Yoruba language, a regional lingua franca in Nigeria, which belongs to the Kwa sub-family of Kordofanian phylum of the larger African language family, is spoken in Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Liberia, Brazil, Cuba, etc. The language attests a very productive feature of reduplication which has attracted the attention of many scholars. But its extended form, tagged, “retriplication” in this paper, remains largely unexplored. This study examines the form and functions of reduplication and retriplication which are two morphological processes where the former serves as a pedestal to the latter. While applying the participant observation method to elicit data from main Yoruba cities in Nigeria, the Pulleyblank (2009) model, as well as the descriptive and context usage approaches are employed to analyse and discuss the data. The study reveals that while reduplication process actualises intensification, nominalisation, emphasis and comparative qualifying, retriplication serves for more intensification, wider nominalisation, more emphasis and superlative qualifying. The research further reveals that, while all cases of verb and adjective reduplicates can be retriplicated without generating unacceptable utterances in Yoruba, the gerundive reduplicates cannot culminate in retriplication. However, kinship reduplicate allows retriplication when stretched to the third generation. The paper concludes by calling for more study on retriplication in other languages of the world, particularly, African and Asian languages that massively exhibit the two phenomena.
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Holm, John, and Incanha Intumbo. "Quantifying superstrate and substrate influence." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 24, no. 2 (August 21, 2009): 218–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.24.2.02hol.
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To quantify the degree to which the structure of superstrate and substrate languages influence that of a creole, this paper compares the nearly 100 grammatical features of Guiné-Bissau Creole Portuguese surveyed in Baptista, Mello, & Suzuki (2007) with the corresponding structures in Balanta (one of the creole’s substrate/adstrate languages) and Portuguese (its superstrate), proceeding from one area of syntax to another. However, tables summarizing the presence or absence of features in each of the three languages are not organized by area of syntax but rather by the patterns of the features’ presence or absence in the three languages, allowing a quantification of the various patterns of influence, e.g. the percentage of cases in which a feature is found in the creole only, in the creole and its superstrate only, in the creole and its substrate only, or in all three. These percentages are then discussed regarding what support they might lend to the various hypotheses purporting to explain the sources of creole language structures: the influence of superstrate and substrate languages, universals, creole-internal innovations, and the convergence of all or some of these. The issue of Balanta being both a substrate and an adstrate language with many speakers bilingual in the creole is also discussed, as is the dated bias in the very grammatical categories chosen for the survey, which assumes an Atlantic creole prototype based on ‘Kwa’ rather than West Atlantic languages, the Niger-Congo subfamily to which Balanta belongs.
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Ansah, Mercy Akrofi. "A Grammatical Description of Leteh Nominal Morphology." Studies in African Linguistics 50, no. 2 (September 18, 2021): 346–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v50i2.125661.
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Abstract: The paper describes Leteh nominal morphology within the framework of Basic Linguistic Theory (Dixon 2010; Dryer 2006). The nominal morphology is described in the context of two phenomena: number marking and noun classification. Leteh is a South-Guan language from the Niger-Congo family of languages. The morphology of Leteh is largely agglutinative. Güldemann and Fiedler (2019) argue that current analyses of gender systems are heavily influenced by those in Bantu languages and not cross-linguistically applicable. They propose an alternative analysis that includes the notions agreement class and nominal form class. In this paper I adopt the notion of nominal form class to classify nouns in Leteh. The nouns are grouped into four major classes based on the plural morphemes that they take. These classes are subdivided based on the singular forms with which they are paired. Key words: verbal prefixes, Kwa, tense/ aspect, negation, person, mood, motion Note: Changes were made to the title and abstract of this article after publication, on 9/20/2021.
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Makeeva, Nadezhda, and Andrey Shluinsky. "Numerals in Akebu." Open Linguistics 6, no. 1 (July 27, 2020): 344–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/opli-2020-0107.
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AbstractThis article presents an overview of the numeral system in Akebu, a Kwa language of Togo. The Akebu numeral system is a decimal one and contains simple numerals from ‘1’ to ‘9’ and decimal bases for ‘10’, ‘100’, and ‘1,000’. The former have noun class agreement markers, while the latter do not. Only some noun classes are compatible with numerals, but among them there are both plural and singular classes.
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Michaud, Alexis, Guillaume Jacques, and Robert L. Rankin. "Historical transfer of nasality between consonantal onset and vowel." Diachronica 29, no. 2 (June 8, 2012): 201–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.29.2.04mic.
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Comparative data from several language families show that nasality can be transferred between a syllable-initial consonant cluster and the following vowel. The cases reported to date are summarized, and a new analysis is proposed for a set of Sino-Tibetan data. The evolution appears to go in both directions: from the consonantal onset to the following vowel in Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo (Kwa) and Indo-European (Celtic), and from the vowel to the preceding consonant in Siouan. However, an examination of the conditions on these changes brings out an asymmetry. In most cases, transfers of nasality take place from a consonantal onset to a following vowel; the instances we found of a regular change in the opposite direction all come from languages where there is one of the following restrictions on nasal sounds: (i) nasal consonants are nonphonemic (contextually predictable), or (ii) the opposition between nasal and oral vowels is neutralized after nasal consonants (in favor of nasal vowels).
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Stewart, Sandra Lilian, and Maropeng Modiba. "The Reading Grannies." Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Education 8, no. 2 (December 30, 2019): 147–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.32674/jise.vi0.725.
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This paper reports on an intervention intended to develop literacy amongst learners in a rural, state farm school situated in Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN), South Africa. The principal and teachers in the school invited a group of volunteers, who named themselves the “Reading Grannies” into the school to model how to read an English text. The assumption was that listening to English read by first-language (L1) speakers, would expose learners to, for example, pronunciation, tone and expression and convey meaning better. In addition, both teachers and learners who were non-primary English speakers would develop an ear for the language and this would, in turn, help teachers to improve their teaching of English.
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van Putten, Saskia. "Perception verbs and the conceptualization of the senses: The case of Avatime." Linguistics 58, no. 2 (April 26, 2020): 1–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0039.
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AbstractLanguages differ in their number of basic verbs that describe perceptual experience. Some languages have only two such verbs: one for visual perception and another for non-visual perception. How do speakers of these languages conceptualize sensory perception? To shed light on this question, this paper investigates the perception verbs mɔ̀ ‘see’ and nu ‘hear/feel/taste/smell’ in Avatime (Kwa, Niger-Congo). These verbs are studied together with the constructions in which they occur, using both translated data and spontaneous discourse. Both perception meanings and meanings outside the domain of perception are taken into account. The detailed picture that emerges shows some previously undocumented patterns of perception encoding and enriches our understanding of the conceptualization of the senses more generally.
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Heath, Jeffrey, and Gudrun Miehe. "Die Präfixnasale im Benue-Congo und im Kwa: Versuch einer Widerlegung der Hypothese von der Nasalinnovation des Bantu." Language 70, no. 4 (December 1994): 862. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/416359.
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Lumsden, John S. "Possession." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 9, no. 1 (January 1, 1994): 25–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.9.1.03lum.
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This paper compares the notion of "possession" as it is expressed in the verbs of Haitian Creole, French, and Fongbe (a West African language of the Kwa family). It is argued that the notion of possession in verbal semantics is best represented as an implicit argument, i.e., an argument that is present in the semantic representation, but not in the syntax. The implicit argument [POSSESSION] is ambiguous, allowing it to be manifested in the syntactic representation in different ways. The properties of the creole verbs are consistently parallel with those of the Fongbe verbs, and they are often in contrast with the properties of the French verbs. Since French and Fongbe are among the historical sources of Haitian Creole (Lefebvre & Lumsden 1989), these patterns have consequence for the evaluation of theories of creole genesis.
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Genzel, Susanne, and Frank Kügler. "Production and perception of question prosody in Akan." Journal of the International Phonetic Association 50, no. 1 (December 11, 2018): 61–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0025100318000191.
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The paper presents a production experiment investigating the phonetic parameters speakers employ to differentiate Yes–No questions from string-identical statements in Akan, a West-African two-tone Kwa language. Results show that, in comparison to the statement, speakers use a higher pitch register throughout the utterance as a global parameter, and falling f0, longer duration and higher intensity as local parameters on the final syllable of the Yes–No question. Further, two perception experiments (forced-choice identification and gating) investigate the perceptual relevance of the global parameter and the local final parameters. Results show that listeners cannot assess the higher pitch register information to identify the mode of a sentence early on. Rather, identification takes place when the local phonetic parameters on the final vowel are available. The findings point to the superiority of language-specific cues in sentence mode perception. It is suggested that Akan uses a low boundary tone that associates with the right edge of the intonation phrase (L%) in Yes–No questions. The results are discussed from the point of view of question intonation typology in African languages. It is argued that a classification along the lines of functionally relevant cues is preferable to an impressionistic analysis.
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Owusu Ansah, Victoria. "Elision in Esahie." Ghana Journal of Linguistics 9, no. 2 (December 31, 2020): 22–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/gjl.v9i2.2.
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One of the syllable structure changes that occur in rapid speech because of sounds influencing each other is elision. This paper provides an account of elision in Esahie, also known as Sehwi, a Kwa language spoken in the Western North region of Ghana. The paper discusses the processes involved in elision, and the context within which elision occurs in the language. The paper shows that sound segments, syllables and tones are affected by the elision process. It demonstrates that elision, though purely a phonological process, is influenced by morphological factors such as vowel juxtapositioning during compounding, and at word boundary. The evidence in this paper show that there is an interface between phonology and morphology when accounting for elision in Esahie. Data for this study were gathered from primary sources using ethnographic and stimuli methods.
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Akuamah, Abdulai. "A Morphosyntactic Analysis of Some Asante Weed Names." International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation 4, no. 5 (May 30, 2021): 189–205. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.5.21.
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This paper investigates the morphosyntactic features of some indigenous weed names identified among the Asante people of Ghana. Asante is a dialect of Akan and belongs to the Kwa (Congo-Niger) language family spoken mainly in Southern Ghana. This paper discusses some forty-four (44) weed names in Asante. All the data used were collected from primary sources. The data were collected from twenty (20) native speakers of Asante through unstructured interviews. The study has revealed various morphological processes in the language that include affixation, reduplication, and compounding in terms of morphological structure. The weed names were morphologically structured as single words, di-morphemic, phrases and clauses reduced to weed names. Syntactically, these sentential names can be simple, compound, and complex sentences which can function as declarative and imperative sentences.
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Ollennu, Yvonne Akwele Amankwaa. "ADJECTIVE SEQUENCING IN GA." Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics 10 (December 13, 2017): 71–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.5750/bjll.v10i0.1384.
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The use of multiple words to describe nouns is a common phenomenon in language and languages that have adjectives employ this word class.Ga, a Kwa language of the Niger Congo, branch is no exception, whereas languages without adjectives may use other lexical categories like nouns and verbs which play the adjectival role. Ga has adjectives and employs them as attributives for nouns. The paper examines the syntactic rule governing the occurence of several adjectives serving as attibtutes of a single head noun. In this paper the noun is considered as the head of the Ga Nominal Phrase. The order of these adjectives has not received scholarly attention in Ga and this is to fill that gap in the literature. I argued that the order of adjectives is not haphazardly arranged but follows a laid down syntactc prescription. For instance the data showed that Dimension adjectives normall occur in first position, whereas colour adjectives occur further from the head noun. It was also revealed that in the ordering of adjectives in which Value adjectives is included, the Age adjective occurs in last position and Value adjective occurs first or last when included in the ordering of adjectives for a noun. Consequently, it is opined that defying the arrangement in the ordering of the adjectives resulted in unacceptable forms.The adjectives are grouped according to Dixon semantic classes. Data is gathered from native speakers of Ga. The findings contribute to the existing literature on adjective sequencing in Ghanaian languages.
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Bruyn, Adrienne. "Claire Lefebvre, Creole genesis and the acquisition of grammar: The case of Haitian Creole. (Cambridge studies in linguistics, 88.) Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xviii, 461. Hb £45.00, $74.95." Language in Society 30, no. 1 (January 2001): 135–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404501331056.
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In the continuing debate on the origins of creole languages, Lefebvre has long taken a strong stance in favor of an essential contribution of the West African substratum to the grammatical makeup of Haitian Creole; thus, she opposes both a universalist account along the lines of Derek Bickerton's bioprogram (e.g. 1984), and Robert Chaudenson's superstratist approach (e.g. 1992). Lefebvre's present book summarizes the main findings of two decades of research by herself and others (such as John Lumsden and Anne-Marie Brousseau) through various projects carried out at the Université du Québec à Montréal. The overall aim of this enterprise has been to test the hypothesis that adult speakers of the substratum languages, in creating a new creole language, use the properties of their native lexicons as well as the parametric values and semantic interpretation rules of their native grammars (9). In order to test this hypothesis, Haitian Creole is compared, on the one hand, with its superstratum or lexifier language, French, and on the other hand, with Fongbe (or Fon, belonging to the Gbe cluster of Kwa languages), as a representative of the substratum. Most of the book consists of the presentation of such three-way comparisons in regard to nominal structure (Chap. 4), the marking of tense, mood, and aspect (Chap. 5), pronouns (Chap. 6), clausal operators and the structure of the clause (Chaps. 7–8), the properties of verbs (Chap. 9), derivational affixes (Chap. 10), compounds (Chap. 11), and parametric options (Chap. 12). In all these areas, striking similarities between Haitian and Fongbe are revealed.
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Grubic, Mira, Agata Renans, and Reginald Akuoko Duah. "Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo." Linguistics 57, no. 1 (January 26, 2019): 221–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2018-0035.
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Abstract This paper discusses the relation between focus marking and focus interpretation in Akan (Kwa), Ga (Kwa), and Ngamo (West Chadic). In all three languages, there is a special morphosyntactically marked focus/background construction, as well as morphosyntactically unmarked focus. We present data stemming from original fieldwork investigating whether marked focus/background constructions in these three languages also have additional interpretative effects apart from standard focus interpretation. Crosslinguistically, different additional inferences have been found for marked focus constructions, e.g. contrast (e.g. Vallduví, Enric & Maria Vilkuna. 1997. On rheme and kontrast. In Peter Culicover & Louise McNally (eds.), The limits of syntax (Syntax and semantics 29), 79–108. New York: Academic Press; Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007b. In place – Out of place: Focus in Hausa. In Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds.), On information structure, meaning and form, 365–403. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.; Destruel, Emilie & Leah Velleman. 2014. Refining contrast: Empirical evidence from the English it-cleft. In Christopher Piñón (ed.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 10, 197–214. Paris: Colloque de syntaxe et sémantique à Paris (CSSP). http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/eiss10/), exhaustivity (e.g. É. Kiss, Katalin. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 74(2). 245–273.; Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007a. Exhaustivity marking in Hausa: A re-evaluation of the particle nee/cee. In Enoch O. Aboh, Katharina Hartmann & Malte Zimmermann (eds.), Focus strategies in African languages: The interaction of focus and grammar in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic (Trends in Linguistics 191), 241–263. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.), and existence (e.g. Rooth, Mats. 1999. Association with focus or association with presupposition? In Peter Bosch & Rob van der Sandt (eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives, 232–244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.; von Fintel, Kai & Lisa Matthewson. 2008. Universals in semantics. The Linguistic Review 25(1–2). 139–201). This paper investigates these three inferences. In Akan and Ga, the marked focus constructions are found to be contrastive, while in Ngamo, no effect of contrast was found. We also show that marked focus constructions in Ga and Akan trigger exhaustivity and existence presuppositions, while the marked construction in Ngamo merely gives rise to an exhaustive conversational implicature and does not trigger an existence presupposition. Instead, the marked construction in Ngamo merely indicates salience of the backgrounded part via a morphological background marker related to the definite determiner (Schuh, Russell G. 2005. Yobe state, Nigeria as a linguistic area. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 31(2). 77–94; Güldemann, Tom. 2016. Maximal backgrounding=focus without (necessary) focus encoding. Studies in Language 40(3). 551–590). The paper thus contributes to the understanding of the semantics of marked focus constructions across languages and points to the crosslinguistic variation in expressing and interpreting marked focus/background constructions.
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Amfo, Nana Aba Appiah. "Explaining connections in Akan discourse." Languages in Contrast 7, no. 2 (December 7, 2007): 185–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lic.7.2.06amf.
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The present paper focuses on the communicative roles of three discourse markers, na, (n)so and nanso, in Akan, a Niger Congo (Kwa branch) language. (N)so is an additive focus marker. Its use gives the addressee an indication that the (n)so-utterance ought to be processed within a parallel context provided by the immediately preceding utterance. It highlights the fact that the kind of parallel context that licenses the use of (n)so is much more lenient than is the case for the use of its English equivalent also/too. Significantly, an explanatory relation is among the inferential relations that may arise as a result of the use of the clausal coordinating connective na, a situation which is not permissible in the case of its English counterpart and. The contrastive marker nanso, much like its English counterpart but, signals that the proposition expressed in a following utterance is contrary to what is to be expected. It is suggested that specific language-internal facts ought to be recognized and accounted for within the pursuit of a general cognitive theory of utterance interpretation.
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Christian Aboh, Sopuruchi, and Amarachi Jennifer Onuorah. "Semelfactivity in Igbo." Macrolinguistics 8, no. 13 (December 30, 2020): 56–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.26478/ja2020.8.13.4.
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This paper examines semelfactivity in the Igbo language. It seeks to highlight semelfactive verbs and other semelfactive sentential elements. The data for the study were obtained through introspection which were confirmed by two native speakers of Igbo and were analysed descriptively. From the study, it was discovered that the semelfactive verbs in Igbo that co-occur with bound verb complements for emphasis are takwu ‘whisper’, lo ‘swallow’, nwụ ‘die’ and hụpe ‘glimpse’ whereas kọ ‘scratch’, tabi ‘blink’, ze ‘sneeze’, kụ ‘knock’, ti ‘shout’, wuli ‘jump’ (wu ‘jump’. -li ‘upward’ as opposed to wuda ‘jump downwards)’, gba ‘kick’, nyụ ‘fart’ and kwa ‘cough’ that take inherent complement verbs. The research also revealed that na mberede ‘suddenly’ and na ntabi anya ‘in a twinkle of an eye’ are semelfactive adverbials in the Igbo language. Based on the findings, the paper concludes that in Igbo, semelfactivity entails a one-time action and a spontaneous or instantaneous action.
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Caesar, Regina Oforiwah. "Locative Constructions in Dangme." Issues in Language Studies 9, no. 2 (December 3, 2020): 52–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.33736/ils.2283.2020.
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This paper explores locative constructions in Dangme, a language that belongs to the Kwa family of languages. The paper discusses the components of the basic locative construction in Dangme. It also examines the syntax and semantics of verbs of position and verbs of change of location that function in the basic locative constructions in Dangme. Data were drawn from mainly primary sources from 14 native speakers of Dangme. I demonstrate that postposition and locative nouns mainly express location in Dangme. There are a set of nouns that also function as indicators of location and direction to places. It is to be noted that in locative constructions, the postposition class and the adjunct of location indicate the location of entities in Dangme as in other languages. The postposition class can take the form of a word or a phrase. The phrase is made up of an NP and locative morphemes: mi ‘inside’, se ‘back’, nɔ/hiɔwe ‘top’, kpɛti ‘middle’, he ‘side’ nya ‘edge of, tue ‘edge’ and sisi ‘under’. The data also revealed that in Dangme, a locative morpheme or phrase can co-occur with a positional verb in a construction to express the position of an entity at a location.
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Olivio, Ann Marie. "Exploring the speech rhythm continuum." Journal of Speech Sciences 1, no. 2 (February 3, 2021): 3–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.20396/joss.v1i2.15022.
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In current speech rhythm research, the traditional search for isochrony and speech rhythm classes has been replaced with a focus on uncovering the acoustic correlates of rhythm in the speech signal (Ramus, Nespor, and Mehler 1999, Grabe and Low 2002, Cummins 2002). In this paper, I present findings from a study in which I describe speech rhythm in a language whose rhythm had not been previously studied—Ashanti Twi (Niger-Congo, Kwa). Additionally, I test the validity of claims made about the utility of various rhythm metrics. Two native speakers of Ashanti Twi participated in the study. Each speaker was recorded while reading a translation of “The North Wind and the Sun”. Vocalic and consonantal intervals were measured in Praat using auditory and visual cues. Various rhythm metrics (interval measurements and Pairwise Variability Indices) were then computed and compared to results from prior studies. Results show that Ashanti Twi is rhythmically more similar to languages that have been traditionally described as syllable-timed, such as French and Spanish. However, it does not fall clearly into the traditional stressor syllable-timed categories, supporting the claim that speech rhythm should be studied as a continuum rather than a categorical distinction.
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Thompson, Rachel. "The Semantic Values of AÐE and LA in Ewe." Contemporary Journal of African Studies 3, no. 2 (February 29, 2016): 71–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/contjas.v3i2.3.
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Aɖe and la have multiple functions which are often realized by the position they occupy in various syntactic environments in Ewe, a Kwa language. Aɖe can function as an indefinite marker, a partitive marker or an indefinite pronoun. La can function as a definite marker, an agentive suffix, or a terminal particle. As a terminal particle, la occurs at the end of preposed adverbial phrases and nominal phrases, embedded relative clauses which are postposed to the nominal heads, and other dependent clauses in Ewe constructions. Using the Givenness Hierarchy, this study argues that regardless of the different syntactic environments in which these particles occur, each of them has a univocal value semantically: the use of aɖe and la encode the cognitive statuses ‘referential’ and ‘uniquely identifiable’ respectively in Ewe.Keywords: Particles, Indefiniteness, Definiteness, Referential, Uniquely Identifiable
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Otoo, Ruby. "Metaphorical Extensions of Ye (eat) Verb: The Case of Gᾶ." International Journal of Linguistics 9, no. 6 (January 2, 2018): 132. http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v9i6.12104.
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The aim of this paper is to examine lexical semantics from a cognitive approach in Gᾶ, a Kwa language. In Gᾶ, the verb Ye ‘eat’ has polysemous and metaphorical uses. There has been linguistic research in Gᾶ and there is still the interest to study the language. Currently, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study that specifically explores lexical semantics from the cognitive approach. This is the gap the researcher attempts to fill. The verb denoting perception has metaphorical expressions that will have some relationship with the original verb. In the discussion, we consider the pragmatic implications and relevance of the extensions derived from the verb ye ‘eat’.. We look at the nature of the derived semantic patterns and consider the extent to which they are peculiar to the Gӑ language and culture. The study is based on Sweetser’s (1990) cognitive approach of semantic change. The paper shows that most of the metaphorical extensions are based on human perception and interaction with the physical world. The findings of the study reveal that the metaphorical meanings reflect the socio-cultural experiences of the Gӑ land, hence, the more they move away from the physical realms, the greater the realizations.
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Ansah, Gladys Nyarko. "Cognitive models of anger in Akan." Cognitive Linguistic Studies 1, no. 1 (August 5, 2014): 131–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cogls.1.1.06ans.
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This paper analyses the conventional metaphorical expressions of anger in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, West Africa, in order to identify conventional conceptual metaphors of the concept in the language. Native and relatively monolingual speakers of Akan in semi-rural and rural Ghana participated in focus group discussions to generate a corpus of 23,800 words from which metaphorical expressions of anger were drawn. The analysis reveals that Akan conceptualisations of anger are based on both general metonymic and metaphorical principles that are grounded in fundamental human experiences including physiological and socio-cultural experiences. The major conventional conceptual metaphors identified in Akan are: ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER, ANGER IS A GROWING WEED, ANGER IS A BURDEN, ANGER IS A DANGEROUS THING, ANGER IS A DISEASE and ANGER IS FOOD. While Akan conceptualisation of aspects of anger are similar in some ways to Lakoff’s prototypical anger scenario, i.e., akin to the retribution stage of the prototypical anger scenario in English, it is important to mention that stages 3 and 4 of the prototypical anger scenario in English may be of no consequences at all in what appears to be the prototypical anger scenario in Akan.
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Paster, Mary. "Floating tones in Ga." Studies in African Linguistics 32, no. 1 (June 1, 2003): 18–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v32i1.107345.
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This paper provides robust empirical evidence for floating tones in Ga, a Kwa language of Ghana. As will be shown, floating tones are crucial to an analysis of verbal tense/aspect/mood distinctions. I begin by describing two tonal processes, the HL rule and Plateauing. While these are regular processes of the language, both are blocked in the perfective. I show that the blockage is the result of a floating low tone that marks the perfective, and that the floating tone marker explains other anomalous tonal effects in the perfective. I then give an analysis of floating tone prefixes that mark certain tenses/aspects/moods by associating to the subject prefix, thus overwriting the lexical tone of the subject prefix. Finally, I give examples of suffixed floating that mark tense/aspect/mood by associating to verb stems, causing the underlying stem tones to delink. In these tenses/aspects/moods, we find evidence for an underlying L vs. toneless contrast, constituting another phenomenon where, as with floating tones, there is a mismatch between the number of tones and tonebearing units. Thus, a major prediction of Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith 1976, Clements and Ford 1979) is borne out in Ga.
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Kügler, Frank. "Phonological phrasing and ATR vowel harmony in Akan." Phonology 32, no. 1 (May 2015): 177–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675715000081.
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This paper examines phonological phrasing in the Kwa language Akan. Regressive [+ATR] vowel harmony between words (RVH) serves as a hitherto unreported diagnostic of phonological phrasing. In this paper I discuss VP-internal and NP-internal structures, as well as SVO(O) and serial verb constructions. RVH is a general process in Akan grammar, although it is blocked in certain contexts. The analysis of phonological phrasing relies on universal syntax–phonology mapping constraints whereby lexically headed syntactic phrases are mapped onto phonological phrases. Blocking contexts call for a domain-sensitive analysis of RVH assuming recursive prosodic structure which makes reference to maximal and non-maximal phonological phrases. It is proposed (i) that phonological phrase structure is isomorphic to syntactic structure in Akan, and (ii) that the process of RVH is blocked at the edge of a maximal phonological phrase; this is formulated in terms of a domain-sensitive CrispEdge constraint.
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Ollennu, Yvonne Akwele Amankwaa. "On Predication of Adjectives in Ga." International Journal of Linguistics 9, no. 2 (April 14, 2017): 70. http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v9i2.11067.
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The adjective as a word class is elusive, as sometimes this distinct class is not easy to be identified in some languages though recent linguistics studies have claimed it exists in all languages. In Ga, a Kwa language of Niger Congo, the adjective class can be clearly defined. The Ga adjective class consists of both derived and underived forms. Adjectives are syntactically known to play the role of attribution, and/or predication and also found in comparative constructions. This paper investigates how adjectives in predicative positions in English are expressed in Ga and more especially when multiple ones serve as copula complement. It shows that adjectives in predication are expressed through verbs in Ga. The adjectives found in Ga are classified according to Dixon semantic classes. The data for this study were collected through questionnaire and follow up interviews from some native speakers. From the study, it came to light that verbs that occur in predicate positions as head of the verb phrases may have adjective equivalents but speakers prefer the verbs to the adjectives and there seems to be some number agreement with the nouns in subject position. When the adjective has no verb equivalent, natives make use of relative clauses and also make use of the adjectives. The study further revealed that when multiple adjectives are used in predicative position, though a restricted order was not established, there exist a preferred order for example, dimension adjectives occur before colour adjectives.
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Lee, Soo-Hwan, and Doo-Won Lee. "Nominal mismatches in Swahili locatives." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 4, no. 1 (March 15, 2019): 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4473.
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According to Carstens (2008), Bantu locatives in general project double DPs. However, recent works have presented convincing evidence for a reduction in nominal size for Bantu locatives (Fuchs & van der Wal 2017, 2018). We argue that the actual size of nominals in Swahili, a language of the Bantu family, depends on the type of locative expression. In this regard, a mismatch in terms of nominal size is observed for Swahili. By means of analyzing such mismatches, we adopt the PP analysis as well as the stacked-n analysis suggested by Kramer (2015). In doing so, we demonstrate that there are two distinct ways of forming Swahili locatives. The first is to utilize a prepositional head, P (e.g., kwa), projected above a full nominal whereas the other is to make use of the head, n (e.g., -ni), projected within a reduced nominal. Such dissimilarity in constructing locatives, in turn, gives rise to mismatches in Swahili nominals.
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Adomako, Kwasi. "FINAL-NASAL DELETION IN AKAN (ASANTE TWI) REDUPLICATION." Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics 8 (October 14, 2015): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.5750/bjll.v1i0.594.
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In this paper, I examine the phenomenon of reduplicant-nasal deletion observed in some reduplicative prefixes of Akan (a Niger-Congo, Kwa language). In the Akan phonology, nasals are among non-vowel sonorants that are permitted syllable or word-finally (Dolphyne 1988, Abakah 2005). However, it is observed that these nasals, particularly [m], are sometimes deleted in some reduplicants final position. In this paper, I show that verb bases of CVN or CVVN structures are of two different morphemic structures in the underlying representation; monomorphemic verb base and bimorphemic verb base. The latter structure, on which this paper focuses, has the composition: morpheme1 + morpheme2. It is observed that while the former preserve their ‘final’ nasals in the reduplicants, the latter lose them in their reduplicants. We analyse this phonological phenomenon as resulting from the language’s desire to satisfy a high-ranking template satisfaction constraint (after McCarthy and Prince 1994a) within the Optimality Theory framework. Keywords: Nasal deletion, Akan, reduplication, Optimality Theory, phonology.
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Wallace, Belle, and Harvey B. Adams. "Assessment and Development of Potential of High School Pupils in the Third World Context of Kwa Zulu/Natal." Gifted Education International 5, no. 2 (January 1988): 72–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/026142948800500203.
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Part One of this series of articles outlines the current educational situation in the Third World context of Kwazulu/Natal. It highlights the problems caused by inadequate school buildings, low school attendance, lack of adequately trained teachers and, not surprisingly, the consequent general low school achievement of pupils. To compound these already debilitating factors, pupils learn in their second language (English) and the curriculum is Western oriented. However, the writers argue that even if the material conditions were improved, the teachers' qualifications upgraded and the curriculum made more relevant, there are other factors concerning the pupils themselves which inhibit their learning. Part two analyses some of the causes of underachievement. Certain types of social environment are not conducive to cognitive development to an extent sufficient for the learner to derive optimal benefit from schooling. (Vygotsky, 1978, Brushlinsky 1979, Feuerstein, 1979). These social conditions which include poverty, disrupted family life and fragmented cultural heritage are common causes of under-achievement. A direct and primary cause of pupils' under-achievement (which is distinct from hereditary or organic factors) derives from a lack of relevant and appropriate mediated learning experiences which are necessary for school-based learning. Mediation refers to the intentional selection and interpretation of the child's experiences by an adult who helps the child to build the cognitive “scaffolding” and gradually enables him/her to make sense of the world and to gain mastery and independence in learning. The child builds on mastered concepts, the higher concepts extending and transforming the lower. It is not a question of whether the child receives mediation or not because obviously in any home environment mediation is taking place between adult and child, but whether the child receives the kind of mediation which provides the cognitive scaffolding necessary for certain kinds of learning, in this instance, formal school learning.