Typological Features Template for Southern Dagaare
Revision as of 09:35, 17 March 2010 by John Ganaah (Talk | contribs)
Mark Ali, University of Education, Winneba
| Feature | Description | ||||||||||||
| Phonological Features | |||||||||||||
| Vowel inventory | a e i o u ɛ ɔ | ||||||||||||
| Vowel harmony | Dagaare has advanced(/a/,/e/,/i/,/o/,/u/)and un-advanced (/a/,/υ/,/ι/,/ɔ/,/ɛ/) tongue root vowels.Only one group can occur within a simple word environment.e.g bie (child), tuo (bitter); pυɔ (stomach), tιε (tree). | ||||||||||||
| Consonant inventory | b d f g gb gy h k kp ky l m n ŋ ŋm ny p r s t v w y z
Some people mark additional consonantal sounds. | ||||||||||||
| Tone
The basic tone structures of Dagaare is L H and M. Although there appear to be a downstep no elaborate study has confirmed this. |
Tone has both lexical and grammatical marking on words. eg:i.tú V(to dig)ii.tù V(to follow), iii. tù V(to narrate); i.má PARTC(well),ii.mà V(to stick) iii.mǎ N(mother)and i. báá N(dog) ii.bàà V(to grow), bàá N(pond/stream). | ||||||||||||
| Syllable Structure
Dagaare has the following syllable structures: CV; CVV,CVVV,CVC, CVCV, VC, VVCV |
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| Morpho-syntactic Features | |||||||||||||
| morphological classification (1) | |||||||||||||
| morphological classification (2) | head independant marking as in doolee, doo (man), lee (small) = boy | ||||||||||||
| Nominal Phrases | |||||||||||||
| syntactic structure | |||||||||||||
| nominal modification | |||||||||||||
| nominal specification | |||||||||||||
| possession | |||||||||||||
| pronominal system | |||||||||||||
| Verbal Phrases | |||||||||||||
| word order | The following sentence illustrates the basic word order which is SVO | ||||||||||||
| TAM | |||||||||||||
| infinitival forms | |||||||||||||
| verbal constructions | There are serial verb constructions in Dagaare.
Iri gaa gaŋ.
“Get up and go to sleep.”
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| Adpositions | |||||||||||||
| Complementation | |||||||||||||
| Special Properties of Soutern Daagare |