E. Kweku Osam, Ọbádélé Bakari Kambon
Aspects of Akan Verbal Semantics, Pages 1-25
Publication year: 2023

The paper by Duah examines various ways in which pain sensations are expressed in Akan. It argues that pain expressions in the language follow patterns known about the expressions of tastes, visions, and other instantiations of perception. He establishes that pain expressions behave structurally like causative constructions. Agyepong’s paper focuses on analysing Akan (Asante-Twi dialect) verbs that deal with the removal of the external coverings of various items. It examines the semantic characteristics and the argument alternation possibilities that such verbs participate in. She further explores the factors that determine the interpretation of such verbs in Akan. In Afreh’s paper, she explores the syntax and semantics of posture verbs in Akan in what has become known as the Basic Locative Constructions (BLC), using data from the Asante dialect. Situated in the cognitive semantics framework of Talmy (2000), her paper shows that the predication of the location of the Figure entity in constructions involving posture verbs is crucial. The paper by Eshun centres on the verbs of perception in Akan: hú ‘see’ and hwέ ‘look’. Using data from the Mfantse dialect and adopting a cognitive linguistics approach in her analysis, she demonstrates that these two verbs have overlapping usage determined by the context of use and argument selection criteria. In the final paper in the volume, even though Kambon does not deal with the direct semantics of a set of verbs in Akan, he takes an angle that merges the syntax and semantics of verbs in serial verb constructions in the language. Based on the concept of emergence in the natural sciences, and using data from three dialects of the language, he explores the notion of semantic integration in Akan serial verb nominalizations.

 

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