Compounding in Ewe

Abstract

Compounding is a very productive word formation process in Ewe. Works in Ewe grammar (Ofori 2002; Duthie 1996) only referenced it as one of the word formation processes in the language and have not done an in-depth morphological and phonological study on the phenomenon such as pursued in the current thesis. The purpose of this study is to investigate compounding with the view of providing a broad description of the empirical facts of compounds in Ewe. The study examines: the types of compounds in Ewe, the semantic relation between the constituents and the phonological processes involved in compounding. Data for this study is drawn from both primary and secondary sources. The data is based on interactions with native speakers, Ewe novels and course books and my knowledge of the language as a native speaker. The study showed that derived Ewe compounds are not only nouns but also adjectives, and that they are formed from two or more free forms, namely N-N, N-A, N-V, V-V, V-N and N-V-N. Ewe compounds are also attributive, subordinate and coordinate based on the relationship that exists between the constituents. These compounds may have endocentric and exocentric subtypes and the endocentric subtypes may be right-headed, left-headed or dual-headed. In terms of Phonology, the study shows that Ewe does not allow vowel segment sequence. For numeral compounds, the low vowel is always preserved regardless of whether it is a V1 or V2. The low vowel always compensates for the deletion of a non-low vowel. For non-numeral compounds, V2 is always deleted and there is no vowel lengthening to compensate for the vowel loss, and this leads to syllable loss.