Difference between revisions of "The Akan verb kɔ"

Revision as of 14:53, 2 July 2009

Overview

One of the difficult issues when annotating Akan is to decide how to annotate the two verbs bɛ and kɔ. Both verbs occur as independent verbs, meaning come and go respectively. Sometimes however they are used to convey functional information, perhaps of aspectual nature or perhaps information tied to deixis; we are not really sure. There is a third function of Kɔ which occurs when it proceeds a noun denoting a location. In this case Kɔ seems to express directionality. In the following we will only discuss kɔ.

The different uses of kɔ

TypeCraft hosted at the point when we wrote this 37 sentences from Akan that contain kɔ; either as an independent verb or as a verbal prefix. Some of the sentences we found come from Bono (Abron) which is one of the dialects of Akan. You can easily search the database yourself by going to Search for Phrases (you must be logged in) where you enter kɔ into the field: 'Extract morpheme' which you find under the heading Morpheme Level. A list of sentences containing kɔ will appear. You in addition receive information about the annotator and about the date the information was entered into the database. The free translation into English for each of the sentences might help you to further sort the information.

For the following discussion we have exported relevant examples from the TC-database. The EXPORT TO WIKI function is accessible from a button called Phrases on top of your Text Editor page. Click on the button and choose Export To HTML which can not only be used for the export of examples to WORD or Open Office, but also in order to view data in a browser. A download window will appear, and you can either open the export (browser function) or save the result to your harddisk so that you can open it in your favorite editor. If you want to quickly scan through a selected set of examples simply open the TCexport in Firefox. For writing this page we used the browser view to select from the 37 sentences we found those examples that we wanted to integrate into this page.

Kɔ as an independent verb

Let us first look at sentence (1) and (2) which exemplify the use of kɔ as in independent verb meaning go.

The first sentence is a negated imperative while the second sentence shows kɔ in the cannonical position for Akan verbs in single headed sentences. Akan is an SVO language. As one would expect kɔ inflects like any other verb in Akan. In (2) the suffix is glossed as PAST standing for past tense. (2)

Kɔ as a spatial expression

The next three sentences illustrate that kɔ may describe locomotion as well as 'directedness' towards a given endpoint. Notice that the English translations given by native-speaker annotators try to capture this fact, leading to slightly awkward translations such as He left Accra to Kumasi (meaning: going to Kumasi) or He passed by the school to church (meaning: going to church)

(3) (3) is interesting also for others reasons. Ato is said to have taken his piano to town. I was wondering if sɛnkuo possibly refers to one of the African instruments shown in the picture of African music instruments to the right? --Dorothee 00:04, 4 June 2009 (CEST)

The read square-shaped instrument in the middle of the picture is a sanza which is a small thumb piano. The white elements fixed to the body of the instrument are depressed and released to produce a sound. A Sanza is an instrument that easily can be carried by the player.

Perhaps somebody reading this knows whether a sɛnkuo is an instrument similar to a sanza?!

Sentence (4) below shows clearly that also in its function as a spatial expression kɔ remains a verb - it still inflects for tense. (4) (5) Kɔ may combine with expressions of manner of movement as shown in sentence (6) where it combines with the verb dwane.Dwaneintroduces the manner of movement while Kɔ introduces, as its argument, the noun that denotes the endpoint of the motion. In (6) Akan acts like a well-behaved satellite marking language, using Talmy's terminology [1975]. The only difference to more known satellite-marking languages, as far as this case is concerned, is that the 'satellite'-phrase is headed by a verbal predicate rather than by a prepositional one. (6) Let us also look at an interesting nominalization. Consider sentence (7) below:

The noun n’akokɔafuom translated as farm gear, meaning the cloth that you wear when you work on the farm, is a complex noun composed of the verb to go and the verb Kɔ meaning to as in go to the farm.

The third meaning of Kɔ

Kɔ functions as aspectual marker. It seems that in this function it may either occur as an independent verb or as a verbal prefix. So far TC-annotators have chosen to gloss Kɔ in this function as INGR, standing for ingressive. Ingressive in this context means to 'entering into an event'.

However, we are at this point not sure if this is the right annotation and invite comments that will help us to do justice to what we call here the aspectual use of Kɔ . So please consider example (8) to (13) below

We are not quite sure how we should annotat Kɔ in these cases. Any suggestions?