The morphological and syntactic functions of Dagbani nominal suffixes

Fusheini Hudu, Abdallah Iddrisu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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 that marks plurality: (bi-hi). In this paper, we show that while this broad description is generally accepted, it 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 noun phrases. The paper is largely descriptive, with no specific theoretical approach assumed.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)30-50
Number of pages21
JournalTopics in Linguistics
Volume24
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2023

Keywords

  • Dagbani
  • Gur/Mabia languages
  • Nominal morphology
  • number marking
  • suffixes

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The morphological and syntactic functions of Dagbani nominal suffixes'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this