Compounding in Dangme

Abstract

A general study of Dangme morphology has been done. However, the phenomenon of compounding has not been studied extensively as the previous studies just mentioned it as a kind of word formation process (eg., Hevi 2011; Owulah 2014). Considering the importance of compounding as a nominalisation process in Dangme, therefore, this study looked at the phenomenon to unravel the nature of compounding in Dangme and to attempt to show what they reveal about compounding in general. Data for the study was drawn from interactions with speakers of Dangme, Dangme novels and radio programmes that are broadcast in Dangme. This was supplemented by the native speaker intuition of the author. The study showed that Dangme compounds are nominals and that they may be formed from two nouns (N-N), a noun and a postposition (N-P), a noun and an adjective (N-A), a noun and a verb (N-V), a verb and a noun (V-N) and two numerals. It is shown that Dangme compounds have endocentric and exocentric subtypes and that the endocentric ones could be left-headed or right-headed. Using Construction Morphology, it is argued that the formal and semantic properties of Dangme compounds that are not traceable to their constituents are holistic properties of the constructions. It is again shown that Dangme multiplicative numerals are exocentric constructions. The phonological processes that compounding in Dangme triggers, including vowel deletion, vowel coalescence, vowel lengthening and tone lowering are discussed.