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Ga Verbs and Their Constructions Extended Changed to Expanded

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Ga Verbs and Their Constructions Extended Changed to Expanded Ga Verbs and their constructions extended changed to expanded M.E. Kropp Dakubu OVERVIEW 1. Types of Verb Heads. In the Ga language, a simple predicative expression is headed by a predicative particle, by a predicative nominal expression, or by a verb. The first two types are not considered here, but for completeness sake examples are given below. Some predicative particles precede the nominal expression, some follow it. Predicative nominals always follow their topic. Predicative Particle: M ni ẁ-tao - n person COMP 1P-want-HAB PRT ‘That's who we are looking for.’ Jéé T̀té PRT.NEG PN ‘It's not Tettey’, ‘that's not Tettey.’ Predicative Nominal: Ŋḿ!ń Jú today Monday ‘Today is Monday.’ È-musũ̀ ,̃̀ pìá k̀ àsá 3S.POSS-stomach bedroom and sitting.room ‘His stomach, chamber and hall’ (ie. he is fat) A verb head always includes a verb stem with aspect, modality and polarity marked on it, and it may also include up to three pre-verb elements, which in this language are heavily grammaticalized verbs carrying features of polarity and deixis, and sharing the aspect marking of the head verb (Dakubu 2004a; 2008, Hellan and Dakubu 2008). One of the preverbs (kɛ) introduces an additional argument, and is discussed further below. Other preverbs in this language have no known effect on argument structure. A verb expression that includes preverbs is referred to as an expanded verb.1 A complex predicative expression may be headed by two (rarely three) verbs (including expanded verbs), which unify both semantically and grammatically to form a serial verb construction. What this means in Ga is that there is a single referential subject, which is expressed before the first verb and may or may not be cliticized on the second as a resumptive pronoun. Usually but not invariably the subject has the same role in respect of both verbs. (See entries for jɛ ́ ‘insult’, kɔ ̃̀ ‘bite’ for cases where subject roles seem to be different.) Each verb may have one or more objects, but each object has a different role, so that the argument roles for the event are distributed across the construction. It is also possible in Ga to have a sequence of two expressions, apparently independent and joined by the coordinating conjunction nì, that are nevertheless grammatically and semantically related in such away that the combination must be regarded as expressing a unified event. (See eg. entries for fó, ka ̃́ (3).) This is tentatively 1 Although many languages of Ghana and its neighbours have what we are calling pre-verbs, the pre-verb structure of Ga seems to be somewhat unusual. In many languages, for example Oti-Volta languages such as Gurene or Dagaare, there are many more preverbs, no preverb is transitive and not all of them are grammaticalized verbs. In Dangme, the language most closely related to Ga, there are five preverbs, including the transitive, and one of them, m㸠can head its own extended verb expression within the expansion of the main verb, see Dakubu 1987 pg. 58.) 11/19/2010 Ga verb dictionary with construction templates.rtf 1 called a conjoining verb construction. In this case one or more roles may be repeated. All of these multi-verb constructions are to be distinguished from series of otherwise independent verb expressions relating to different events in which the subject is not repeated, and from constructions consisting of a matrix verb with a clause complement without a complementizer, but where any or all of aspect, modality, argument reference and argument role are constrained by the matrix verb (for example, the verb nyɛ ̃́ ‘be able’ and its complement). Two further important construction types are headed by verbs. Each preverb, which in this language is a grammaticalized verb, heads an expression within the main verb expression. In Ga this expression is intransitive except in the case of the preverb kɛ, which invariably takes an object. Except for the object of this transitive pre- verb, no other item may intervene between the subject and the verb or follow a pre-verb. In addition, a verb heads a kind of adverbial expression consisting of the verb and its object. This is referred to as a verbid expression (see Dakubu 2004b). It can also enter expanded (see fèê) and serial (verbid) constructions, see the entry for gbèê. Verbid expressions do not share the subject of the matrix verb, which distinguishes them from serial verb constructions. Verbids must also be distinguished from prepositions, of which Ga has very few, principally kɛ ̀ ‘with’ and ákɛ ‘as’. These are also diachronically verbal but behave quite differently from verbids. A verbid expression can modify just one of the verbs in a serial construction, or it may modify the whole construction. In the latter case it occurs following the last verb. See for example the entry for dàmɔ ̃̀ ‘stand’. Similarly a clause complement may complement an entire serial construction, also exemplified by dàmɔ.̃̀ 2. Transitivity Types A Ga verb may be intransitive, transitive, or ditransitive. No thorough count has yet been made,2 but it appears that by far the most common configuration is transitive, relatively few verbs occur in only in intransitive constructions, and most verbs that occur ditransitively can also occur with only one object. Any of these may occur together with a verbid phrase, a secondary predicate, a complement clause, a prepositional phrase, or a predicate adjective or adverb. Verbid phrases and prepositional phrases introduce their own arguments, which may be but are not always core elements in the verb construction. A special kind of extended transitivity occurs in the expanded verb when the transitive preverb is present. In this case one object occurs immediately after the preverb. Another may occur after the head verb, making the whole ditransitive. It is possible, although not common, for two objects to follow the head verb, but in that case the object of the preverb has the role of instrument, as seems to be the case in the second clause of the following sentence: (He-mɔ kaplɛ nɛɛ ní) o-kɛ-gbá-là́ o-he ma (get-IMPER penny this COMP) 2S-move.PRO-strike-ITER 2S.POSS-self slap ‘have some money to make do with.’ (slang) On the other hand, in the following the unrealized object of kɛ seems to be a thematic situation.3 È-kɛ-shí̀ sɛɛ̀ ̀ ákɛ ó-ba mla 2 A major goal of this dictionary is to facilitate such a count. 3 In Ga, non-human second singular objects are regularly represented by nul pronouns. 2 Ga verb dictionary with construction templates.rtf 11/19/2010 3S-MOVE.PRO.AOR-knock PRO.POSS back COMP 2S.SBJV-come quickly ‘he added that you should come on time.’ In a very few cases (five have been noted so far) the construction with kɛ alternates with a ditransitive, but many of the verbs that take the kɛ construction cannot otherwise be transitive, and others cannot otherwise be transitive. 3. Roles In this language, subjects are most typically agents, whether acting with intent or not. Non-animate causers are usually labelled effector. Themes as subjects are usually subjects of intransitives. Comitative can generally be considered a sub-type of theme. Locative roles include goals, ie endpoint, recipient; startpoint; simple locative where no movement involved; locus or area on a containing field in an expression that is not otherwise goal-oriented (commonly the role of a postposition). Another subtype of goal is beneficiary – the one who benefits. Here it is used very sparingly, mainly for nouns with human reference indicating one on whose behalf something is done, for example in “I did it for him”, or who is represented, in “he represented me at the meeting” – and therefore as far as Ga is concerned mainly in serial constructions. Otherwise it is considered too value-laden, and recipient and endpoint are used instead, depending on the situation. Affected is used here where many writers use Patient, to indicate the entity, which may or may not be human or animate, affected by the event. 4. Data sources The contents of the verb dictionary consist mainly of sentences used as illustrations for different meanings in the Ga-English Dictionary with English-Ga Index (2nd edition, 2009). This imposes certain limitations. On the one hand, the sentences for the original dictionary were chosen to illustrate meanings rather than constructions. There may therefore be several sentences exhibiting the same construction, while other constructions may be missing. On the other hand, some attention was paid to syntactic constructions, for instance to provide both intransitive and transitive uses where such occurred. Also, in some cases illustrative sentences were not provided if the usage seemed very “simple”, for example for an S-V-O construction that translates directly into English with no particular syntactic feature, such as a postposition, in either language. Consequently the list of constructions for each verb cannot be assumed to be complete, nor can the sum of all the constructions illustrated here. Approximately 720 verbs are included. This is of course by no means the total inventory of Ga verbs. About 138 verbs included in the 2009 dictionary have not yet been included because no illustrative sentences are available at the moment. A large proportion of verbs have morphologically derived iterative or distributive forms, and many iterative verbs (with an iterative suffix) themselves have distributive (reduplicated) forms. Only a small selection of these have been included. Since our principle interest here is in argument structure this is deemed sufficient, because the only consequence such derivations have for argument structure appears to be that one or more of the arguments must be plural.
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