The Morphological And Syntactic Functions Of Dagbani Nominal Suffixes
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Date
2023
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Topics in Linguistics
Abstract
One of the defining morphological properties of nouns and adjectives of Dagbani (a Gur/Mabia language)
of northern Ghana) and related languages is the presence of suffixes that mark number (singular or
plural) as well as serve as the basis for noun classification. The typical regular noun or adjective (e.g.
bi-a ‘a child’) consists of a bound root (bi-) providing the lexical meaning and a suffix (-a), which
indicates the singular number of the noun. In plural form, the suffix is replaced by a different one.
marks plurality (bi-hi). In this paper, we show that while this broad description is generally accepted,
is much weaker than assumed in previous studies, with many inconsistencies. As our main goal, we offer
a much broader analysis of the morphological and syntactic functions of the nominal suffixes. We show
that these suffixes are primarily there to project lexical words as nouns and adjectives and should be
referred to as nominal suffixes used to inflect inherent nouns and derive nouns and adjectives from verbs.
The nominal suffixes are also crucial to distinguishing between different compound nouns and nouns.
phrases. The paper is largely descriptive, with no specific theoretical approach assumed.
Description
Research Article
Keywords
Nominal morphology, number marking, suffixes