Difference between revisions of "The Akan verb kɔ"

Revision as of 15:38, 10 May 2014

The verbs bɛ and kɔ

The verbs bɛ and kɔ 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 use 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, leaving the discussion of bɛ for another occasion.

TypeCraft hosts at this point (December 2012) 41 Akan sentences that contain kɔ.

The Akan corpus has 1029 sentences, 134 contain kɔ, either as a word or as a morpheme.--Dorothee Beermann 06:51, 3 October 2013 (UTC)
Te Akan  corpus contains 149 instances of  kɔ, either as a word or as a morpheme --Dorothee Beermann 20:14, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Kɔeither is an independent verb, or a verbal prefix. You can search for phrases containing kɔ in several ways. For example enter kɔ into the field: 'Baseform' which you find under the heading Morpheme Level. A list of sentences containing kɔ will appear, the number of sentences found is displayed in the upper left corner of your browser. Each found sentence is listed together with information about the annotator and the date the information was changed last. For the following discussion we have exported relevant examples from corpus to this page. The EXPORT TO WIKI function is accessible for all annotators from the TC Editor. Go to "Phrases" on the tool tab, click 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 a main 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. Osam argues in several articles that Akan verbs inflect for aspect rather than for tense ^[1] (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) means that Ato went with this sɛnkuo to town.

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?

References

1. ↑ OSAM, E. Kweku. 2003. An Introduction to the Verbal and Multi-verbal System of Akan. In Dorothee Beermann and Lars Hellan (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Multi-verb Constructions. Trondheim Summer School 2003. Available from: http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/tross/TROSS03-toc.html