Acta Linguistica Hungarica
Volume/Issue:
Volume 62: Issue 4
On the syntactic category of Akan compounds A product-oriented perspective
Author: Clement Kwamina Insaidoo Appah 1
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  • 1 University of Ghana, Ghana
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1556/064.2015.62.4.1
Page Count:
361–394
Publication Date:
01 Dec 2015
Online Publication Date:
Dec 2015
Article Category:
Research Article
Full access

In accounting for the properties of morphological constructions, one may adopt a source-oriented view where every property of the whole emanates from the parts or a product-oriented view where the whole may have properties that do not come from the parts. Such properties are called holistic constructional properties. Studies on Akan compounds have been invariably source-oriented, assuming that every property in a compound, including the syntactic category, has to come from its constituents. I show that compounding in Akan is blind to the syntactic category of the constituents. Thus, notwithstanding the syntactic category of the constituents the Akan compound is invariably nominal. This paper, therefore, provides evidence of holistic properties of morphological constructions in the form of the syntactic category of Akan compounds. I also present a Construction Morphology modelling of the syntactic category of the Akan compound as a holistic constructional property which is inherited from a constructional meta-schema that is pre-specified to be nominal. Finally, I posit and exemplify four schemas which inherit the category N from the meta-schema but differ in terms of the presence and position of a head constituent.

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Cover Acta Linguistica Hungarica
Acta Linguistica Hungarica
Print ISSN:
1216-8076
Online ISSN:
1588-2624
Keywords:
Akan; compounds; Construction Morphology; constructional schema; holistic properties

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