Analytical issues in the study of verb-noun compounds: How does Akan fit in?

Abstract

This paper highlights three issues in the study of verb-noun compounding and shows how data from Akan (Niger-Congo\Kwa, Ghana) help answer the relevant questions for the language. The issues, which mainly concern the exocentric subtype, are: one, the syntactic category of the left-hand constituent and that of the whole compound; two, whether the formation of verb-noun compounds is a matter of syntax or morphology; and three, how to distinguish between verb-noun compounds and verb phrases, given their structural similarity. Although these issues have come up somehow in the literature on Akan verb-noun compounds, they have not been deliberately targeted for discussion. This paper fills the gap. It is shown that the left-hand constituent is definitely a verb. This raises the question of how to account for the syntactic category of the exocentric subclass of the compound, given that the compound is not a hyponym of the right-hand nominal constituent whose syntactic category may be assumed to percolate to the whole. It is also argued that, per the criteria in the literature, the formation of Akan verb-noun compounds has to be a matter of morphology and not syntax. Finally, it is shown that there are formal and semantic basis for distinguishing verb-noun compounds from verb phrases in Akan.