Browsing by Author "Duah, R.A."
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Item Akan noun–verb nominal compounds: The exocentric synthetic view(Language Sciences, 2017) Appah, C.K.I.; Duah, R.A.; Kambon, O.A synthetic compound is regarded as an endocentric construction in which a deverbal nominal head inherits the internal argument of the underlying verb. The Akan noun-verb nominal compound is analysed as a synthetic noun-noun compound with a deverbal righthand constituent. This is based on a pattern of downstep observed on the first syllable of the second constituent, triggered by a putative floating low tone of a deleted nominal(- izing) prefix. This approach, which makes the compound endocentric, is needed to account for the nominal syntactic category of the compound, given that the left-hand nominal constituent is not the head. In this paper, we discuss and reject this endocentric analysis, showing that the argument for the nominal status of the right-hand constituent based on tonal melody alone is weak because some constructs which meet the structural requirement fail to exhibit the specified tonal melody. We argue, however, that we can maintain the synthetic compound analysis without committing to defend the view that the righthand constituent is nominalized. This is the exocentric synthetic compound view. We present a constructionist account in which the syntactic category is a holistic constructional property of the compound, which is inherited from a meta-schema for Akan compounding. We also present a preliminary constructionist account of the tonal melody of the compound.Item Diversifying language acquisition research can be (partly) achieved in urban societies and with simplified methodologies: Insights from multilingual Ghana(Journal of Child Language, 2023) Omane, P.O.; Duah, R.A.; Benders, T.; Boll-Avetisyan, N.Item Expressing causation in Kwa: Forms and Structures(2017-03-30) Duah, R.A.; Saah, K.K.This paper presents the morphology and syntax of causative expressions in Kwa languages. Data for the study come from fieldwork and other secondary sources. In the languages surveyed, causative expressions show varying degrees of morphosyntactic complexity. The study identified lexical causatives which involve the expression of causing and caused events in a single predicate. In this type of causative, Kwa languages display several verbal alternations such as causative/inchoative alternating verbs, suppletive pairs, eg. wu/ku(m) ‘to die/to kill’ (Akan), srɔ/fia ‘to know/to teach’ (Ewe); equipollent pairs. Data from Kwa languages challenge the traditional assumption that causative/inchoative alternation corresponds to the transitive and intransitive use of the same verb (Haspelmath 1993; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995). For example, in Nzema, some predicates which alternate between causative/inchoative meanings are transitive in their inchoative use. Thus, it is argued that the assumption that causative/inchoative verbs lack “agent-oriented meaning” (Haspelmath 1993) or “undergo a process of detransitivization” (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995) is not a prerequisite for expressing causative meaning (see Kittilä 2009). Kwa is morphologically impoverished and does not seem to display any productive morphological causativization unlike its ancestral Bantu relatives. In all the data, only Nzema and Avatime show some form of morphological causativization (Ford 1970; Chinebuah 1972). It is suggested, however, that these causative suffixes should not be analyzed as morphological causatives as such but that together with their verb stems they form a lexical causative (see Simango 2010 for similar arguments on ciChewa; Rude 1983). In all the Kwa languages sampled, there is an analytic/syntactic causative construction which involves a functional causative predicate which takes a clause as a complement. In most cases, the causative predicate is related to the lexical verb ‘give’ or ‘do’. In its causative function, give is neutral with regards to the type of instigation involved in the causing event but expresses the abstract notion of causation. Although the analytic causative in Kwa languages are underlyingly biclausal, the preferred construction in most of the languages is to have the construction without an overt complementizer, even though biclausal sentences in Kwa normally require an overt complementizer (Saah 1994). It is suggested that one reason for the general optionality of the complementizer is due to the type of complementation involved. The hypothesis is that the complementizer in the analytic causative construction may be semantically vacuous and is not needed to link the causing and caused events semantically. The general optionality of the complementizer in the analytic causative construction, however, has consequences for the grammatical relations and syntactic properties of the causative sentence in general.Item Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo(Linguistics, 2019-01) Grubic, M.; Renans, A.; Duah, R.A.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.Item Force Dynamics and Causation in Akan(University of Ghana, 2013-06) Duah, R.A.; Osam, E.K.; Saah, K.K.; Amfo, N.A.A.This study investigates the expression of force-dynamics in Akan (Talmy 2000). Two main types of causatives can be found in the language, namely non- periphrastic causatives (lexical causatives and cause-effect SVCs) and periphrastic causatives (analytic causatives). The study examines the syntactic properties of causatives and shows that while lexical causatives and cause-effect SVCs involve a monoclausal structure, the analytic causative displays a complex (bi-clausal) structure. In Akan, the difference in the coding of the causee argument in analytic causatives is neither coincidental nor superficial but points to a difference in syntactic properties and structure. It is argued that the different syntactic marking of the causee argument in Akan causatives is not predicted by a syntactic case hierarchy as claimed by Comrie 1976 neither is it motivated by the degree of agentivity of the causee in the causative interaction as Cole 1983 proposed. Rather, the alternative marking of the causee is as a result of restructuring of a complement causative sentence into a partial lexicalised serial verb construction in the language. Five event types of causation are identified namely, MANIPULATION, CREATE, TRIGGER, PROMPT and ALLOW and their properties analysed through Talmy’s (2000) force-dynamics framework. The notion of direct and indirect causation is also examined in Akan. It is emphasized that, at least in Akan, it is better to map event type of causation with the notion of (in)directness of causation because a single causative expression may involve more than one event type of causation.