Difference between revisions of "The Akan verb kɔ"

Revision as of 06:47, 3 October 2013

(A)san

meaning again occurs 7 times in our corpus. the a is sometimes analysed as a prefix. The category is sometimes given as V and sometimes as ADV.--Dorothee Beermann 06:47, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

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, of aspectual nature or information tied to deixis. 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 hosts at the point (December 2012) 41 Akan sentences that contain kɔ; either as an independent verb or as a verbal prefix. The sentences represent different variants of Akan. For each of the Akan texts we indicate which variant it represents. You can easily search the database yourself by going to [http://www.typecraft.org/tc2wiki/Special:TypeCraft/SearchPhrase/ Search for Phrases containing kɔ by entering kɔ into the field: 'Exact morpheme' which you find under the heading Morpheme Level. A list of sentences containing kɔ will appear, the number of tokens found is displayed in the upper left corner of your browser. Each token is listed together with information about the annotator and about the date the information was changed last. For the following discussion we have exported relevant examples from the TC-database. The EXPORT TO WIKI function is accessible for all annotators from the TC Editor. Go to Phrases on the tool tab, click the button and choose export to wiki.

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

In its third function Kɔ appears as a grammatical marker of some sort. 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 when occuring in this capacity as INGR, standing for ingressive. Ingressive in this context means to 'entering into an event'. This classifies Kɔ as an aspectual marker.

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 annotate Kɔ in these cases. Any suggestions?