'Cutting' and 'breaking' events in Akan

This study investigates the grammar and semantics of verbs that describe separation events in Asante Twi (Akan), a Kwa (Niger-Congo) language spoken in Ghana. It adopts a constructionist approach combined with a 'monosemic bias' perspective in the analysis. It theoretical starting point is that contextual interpretations are derived from the interaction of the prototypical meanings of verbs and their arguments. A multi-method approach was used in data gathering: (i) compilation of verbs that code separation as well as sentences in which they are used from literary texts (bibles, and novels) and dictionaries. (ii) Descriptions of separation activities elicited using video-stimuli Bohnemeyer et al. (2001), 61 video clips depicting cutting and breaking events (fieldmanuals.mpi.nl) supplemented by 82 clips created by the author involving culturally appropriate objects (Agyepong 2015). (iii) Spontaneous narratives, and procedural discourses about cultural events/practices involving separation e.g. cooking, palm-wine tapping. (iv) Introspection based on the author's native speaker intuitions. The main findings of the thesis are that there are two central verbs in the separation domain in Akan: twá 'to cut' and bú 'to break'. There are, in addition, more specialized verbs for specific types of object separation, e.g. nú 'harvest palm fruit by poking with a bladed instrument' or pòrò 'to pluck fruit'. The choice of a particular verb in context is determined by the following parameters: instrument involvement, manner of separation, physical properties of entities as well as the end-state result of the situation. Crucially, the thesis further addresses the challenge of how to account for the interpretation of the typical as well as atypical argument realization patterns associated with the separation verbs. It shows how constructional meanings contribute to the interpretation of collocations of the verbs. Other principles such as coercion, addition and suppression of components in the lexical semantics of both the verbs and its arguments as well as cultural implicatures are invoked in the compositional process of calculating the contextual interpretations

The cultural adaptation of quantity judgment tasks in Ghanaian English and Akan

The phenomenon of mass and countability is multifaceted and has been controversially discussed in many disciplines. For linguistics, differences in the morphosyntactic marking of the distinction cross-linguistically, and its cross-cultural ontological-semantic conceptualization are particularly interesting. However, most studies into mass and countability have focused on (American) English, and, to some extent European and Asian languages. African languages and contexts have as yet been neglected by researchinto countability, and the methodological tools employed to study it do not account for the ambient cultural contexts. This paper presents the results of a quantity judgment task designed according to Barner and Snedeker’s (2005) experiment for American English speakers, conducted in Ghanaian English and Akan. The Ghanaian experiments reveal important concerns regarding the stimuli and their applicability, especially to Akan culture. Thus, inspired by other studies into the semantics of Akan, a new set of stimuli is suggested in order to investigate mass and countability contrastively in Ghanaian English and Akan. In this vein, they emphasize the insufficiency of translations with regard to (psycho)linguistic experiments and the importance of proper cultural adaptation

The combinatorial patterns of twá 'to cut' in Asante-Twi (Akan):

Cross-linguistically, verbs have combinatorial patterns. When the semantics of a verb combines with the semantics of its internal arguments, different interpretations are derived. These interpretations can be literal or non-literal (Ameka 2019; Spalek 2015; Rappaport Hovav 2014; Bobuafor 2013, 2018; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2013; Ameka and Essegbey 2007; Levin 1993). Using data collected from written texts, video-stimuli descriptions, spontaneous utterances and native-speaker intuitions, this paper explores the potential combinatorial patterns of twá ‘to cut’ in Asante-Twi (Akan, Kwa-Niger Congo). I show that the verb combines with different types of internal arguments, in different argument structure constructions to derive multiple interpretations. Taking into consideration the fact that “natural language tries to minimize polysemy” (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2013: 2), I propose a univocal lexical semantics for twá ‘to cut’ and show that its basic semantics is kept constant even in non-prototypical contexts. I argue that the use of twá ‘to cut’ in non-prototypical contexts represent contextual modulations of the verb’s single meaning. Following Spalek (2015) and Ameka (2019), I suggest that such contextual interpretations should be analysed compositionally, paying attention to the verb’s internal arguments as well as the argument structure constructions in which it occurs.