Difference between revisions of "小组练习-苗苗的贡献"

Revision as of 17:49, 24 April 2011

By Miaomiao Zhang

This page is about the aspect marker CONS in SVC of Akan. The examples are collected from TC database and articles by Boadi and Osam.

1. INF or CONS?

In Boadi’s article, he claims that the affix à indicates the INF verb form. But other linguists consider this affix as an aspect marker- CONS, because it can only occur after the PROG and FUT which request a certain agreement, namely, “concord”.

2. Data from TC database

From the TC database Akan Future Aspect, we can see that when there are two subjects in a SVC sentence with future aspect, two FUT markers will appear after respectively the first subject and the second subject, which we called the FUT-FUT pattern. In this pattern, the serial verbs obey the agreement of future tense, see examples as follows:

2.1 FUT-FUT pattern

2.2 Purpose FUT-CONS pattern

In other cases, when there is only one subject in the SVC sentence, the FUT-CONS pattern and PROG-CONS pattern occur. That is to say, the serial verbs in such patterns share the same subject. We also found that the CONS can occur in both purpose clause and clauses expressing consecutive actions.

2.3 Consecutive FUT-CONS pattern

2.4 Purpose PROG-CONS pattern

From the data, we can see that the CONS marker in the FUT-CONS pattern can express both purpose and consecutive meaning, while in the PROG-CONS pattern it can only express the purpose meaning.