On holistic properties of morphological constructions: the case of Akan verb–verb nominal compounds

Abstract

Akan verb–verb nominal compounds exhibit unusual formal and semantic properties, including extreme formal exocentricity, where the composition of two verbs yields a noun some of whose semantic properties may not be directly coded in the constituents, and argument structure suppression, where no argument of either constituent can occur in the compound. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I delineate the membership of the class, showing that some of the constructions listed in the literature as verb–verb compounds do not belong to the class; they have formal features that betray them as affix-derived nominals. Secondly, I discuss the rather idiosyncratic properties of the compound. I argue that the form class is inherited from a meta-schema for compounding in Akan which bears a nominal output category. Again, it is a unique constructional property of Akan verb–verb compounds that, unlike other verb-involved compounds, they do not allow any argument of the constituents to become part of the compound. These extra-compositional holistic properties can be accounted for straightforwardly in a framework like Construction Morphology which does not assume that every property in a construction must emanate from its constituents. This study provides evidence for the view that constructions can have holistic properties.

Keywords:

• Akan verb–verb compounds
• Construction Morphology
• holistic constructional properties
• transpositional exocentric compounds

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Acknowledgements

The study reported here formed part of my PhD dissertation from Lancaster University, UK which was funded by a scholarship (CSC reference: GHCS-2008-94) from the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan. I am grateful to the Commonwealth scholarship Commission in the UK for the scholarship. I would also like to thank Prof. Kofi K. Saah as well as three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Acta Linguistica Hafniensia for their comments and suggestions that helped improve the paper. I am solely responsible for any remaining shortcomings in the paper.

Notes

¹ The abbreviations used in this paper are as follows: AFV = Asante final vowel; Ak. = Akuapem dialect; AS = argument structure; As. = Asante dialect; ATR = Advanced Tongue Root; CxM = Construction Morphology; Fa. = Fante dialect; H = high; HUM = human; L = low; LOC = located; N-A = noun–adjective compound; N–N = noun–noun compound; N–V = noun–verb compound; NMLZ = nominalizer; NOM = nominal affix; PFX = prefix; SEM – semantics; SVC = serial verb construction; V–N = verb–noun compound; V–V = verb–verb compound, [V–V]_N = verb–verb nominal compound and [V–V]_V = verb–verb verbal compound.

² This criterion suggests a need for work to be done on distinguishing derivational and inflectional uses of Akan nominal affixes. However, such an enterprise is beyond the scope of the present paper. I assume, though, that only derivational affixes are obligatory in constructions like the one discussed in this paper.

³ An SVC is a construction in which two or more verbs are used to express what is conceptually a unitary event which would be expressed by one verb in a non-serializing language. Typically, in an SVC, the verbs are equipollent and there is no marker of subordination or coordination between the verbs which may also share arguments and other syntactico-semantic properties (Schachter 1976; Baker 1989; Osam 1997; Aikhenvald 1999; Bodomo 2002; Appah 2009b; Haspelmath 2016).

⁴ I assume a qualitative view of productivity with no backing detailed statistical analysis, which would be very useful, if we had a corpus of Akan text.

⁵ In this sense these constructions are like idioms of encoding (Makkai 1969; Booij 2010a).

⁶ A predicate may occur with a modifier in the absence of an argument. The verb eat, for example, should normally occur in a compound with what is eaten, e.g., mango-eating. However, in the absence of mango, a word referring to the location of eating or the instrument for eating may form the compound with the verb, as in tree-eating, where tree is the location. Lieber (1983) would call the tree a semantic argument.

⁷ What is called AS suppression in this paper was also observed by Kambon, Osam, and Amfo (2015) in their discussion of serial verb nominalization. However, the observed complete absence of any argument of the verbs in the resultant nominal is put down to restrictions on collocability.

⁸ A full lexical semantic approach to the discussion of the semantics of Akan compounds, including [V–V]_N compounds, is discussed in Appah (forthcoming b).

⁹ It is worth pointing out that this way of expression faith/belief seems to be a near Kwa-wide feature, as a number of Kwa languages express ‘faith/believe’ in about the exact same words with the same order. The exception is Ga, where the two constituents appear to bear nominalizing affixes and are linked by a coordinating conjunction, thus making the construction read ‘collecting and eating’.

¹⁰ A superscript ‘!’ to the left of an H-tone syllable marks downstep in that syllable.

¹¹ Note that upper case X in (9) can be either V or N only because Appah (2013b), 191–203 has shown that Akan does not have A-N and A-V compounds. It has to be pointed out that Akan is not unique in not having certain combinations of word classes in compounds. English, for example, does not have V-A compounds (Fábregas and Scalise 2012). Sometimes, the restriction on combination of syntactic categories may be found in specific subclasses of compounds. For example, Japanese does not have subordinate compounds of the type A-N or V-N which are possible in English (Fábregas and Scalise 2012).

¹² A more elaborate semantic specification of tútã́ would include the fact that the event coded by the second verb tã́ `to fart' happens as a result of the performance of the action coded by the first verb tú `to uproot' on the referent of the compound - a type of shrub. Thus the shrub may be regarded as the remote cause of SEM_j (Appah forthcoming b).