--Beatrice Owusua Nyampong 13:55, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
Agreement
In Krio, there is referential agreement in PERSON. This is seen in the example below.
Example:
I si anoda dog we fiba am, ehn i bak ohl bon na im moht.
“He sees another dog which resembles him and he too held a bone in his mouth.”
In this example, the third person pronoun 'I' (he) refers to the dog mentioned earlier in the text. The third person object pronoun 'am' (him) refers back to 'I' (he) which refers to the dog. Again in the second clause, the third person possessive pronoun 'i' (his) refers to the pronoun 'i' (he) which refers to the other dog. - both the subject pronoun and the possessive pronoun have the same form.
There is, however, agreement in NUMBER.
Den i go tek di oda bon ehn ron wit di tu bon dem.
“Then he will take the other bone and run with the two bones.”
In the above example, the plural marker 'dehm' agrees with the numeral 'tu' (two). However, 'dehm' can occur without the numeral as in English:
the two bones
di tu bon dehm
the bones
di bon dehm
Here are some more examples to help establish this fact:
1,Bring da/de kop na ya.
SG SG
Bring that/the cup here.
2,Bring den/de kop dehm na ya.
PL PL
Bring those/the cups here.
3,Bring den kop na ya.
PL
Bring those cups here.
4,*Bring da kop dehm na ya.
SG PL
*Bring that cups here.
In the examples above, there is a concordance between the demonstratives and the plural marker 'dehm'. In 1. the singular demonstratives 'da/de' agree with the singular noun 'kop'. In 2. the plural marker agrees with the plural demonstratives 'den/de', eventhough as in 3. the latter can occur on its own and still make the noun plural (however, 'de' on its own is perceived as singular rather than plural). But in 4. the utterance is ungrammatical since there is no agreement between 'dehm' and the singular demontrative 'da'.
Clause Linkage
The complex clause below is a case of parataxis.
Example:
I si anoda dog we fiba am, ehn i bak ohl bon na im moht.
“He sees another dog which resembles him and he too held a bone in his mouth.”
This sentence consists of two clauses which are explicitly linked by the coordinating conjunction 'ehn' (and). Syntactically, both clauses are independent and there is no form of embedding or subordination to prove otherwise.
Serial Verb Construction (SVC) in Krio
The examples below evidently express serial verb constructions where two or three consecutive verbs have the same subject. The verbs may either occur one after the other or after some other lexical words; but they still share a common subject. This linguistic phenomenon is very conspicuous in the language, therefore, Krio can be said to be a serializing language.
I bigin ala ehn trai fɔ pul di tin we de insai im moht, nain i swala am.
“He began to shout and tried to remove what was in his mouth then he swallowed it.”
I dɔn go heng pan di windoh kohtin fɔ kech di flai.
“He has gone to hang on the window curtain to catch the fly.”
Di flai dɔn kam sidon pan di chia we Simon dɔn slip insai.
“The fly has come to sit on the chair in which Simon is asleep.”
Di flai go tinap pan wan kop we di pus dɔn nak ehn di kop dɔn fohdon.
“The fly stood on a cup which the cat has hit and the cup has fallen down. ”
In an article by van de Vate (2006), she states that directional verbs like 'kam' and 'go' occur with motion verbs like 'waka' and 'ron', and prepositional phrases to form locative path expressions, and the position verbs like 'heng', 'sidon', 'tinap' or the locative copula 'de' and prepositional phrases are found in locative place expressions. It is also clear in her paper that directional verbs usually occur in V2 position in SVC after the motion verbs in order to express direction, eg; I de waka go insai rum