A comparative study of the support verbs faire, prendre, donner in French; make, take, give in English; and wᴐ, tsᴐ, na in Ewe

Abstract

This paper compares three semantically equivalent support verbs in French, English and Ewe (A Ghanaian language from the Kwa sub-group of the Niger-Congo languages). It presents data that shows that support verb constructions in the three languages share some syntactic and semantic similarities. However, the support verb tsᴐ in Ewe seems to differ syntactically and semantically from its counterparts prendre and take. We conclude that although the notion of a support verb is a universal phenomenon, their choice is based on the nature of the noun predicate and the appropriateness of that particular support verb to the noun predicate in question. Differences that arise for the same noun predicate may be due to the way the individual languages under study view the world and how they use language to express their conception of the world.