Difference between revisions of "Adpositions in Ewe"

Latest revision as of 19:28, 23 May 2012

By: Theresa Sedzro

General Information

This article belongs to the TC Category Interlinear Glossed Text from Linguistic Research.

In this category we collect TCwiki pages that feature Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) from linguistic publications.

IGT are normally demarcated through indenting, numbering and a space above and under the example. One line of text is followed by one line of glosses and a line with free translation completes the pattern. IGTs from linguistic publications are of particular interest, since they represent a unique alignment of language data and linguistic theory. Example sentences from seminal articles are not rarely quoted in linguistic publications for decades which is another good reason why they need our attention.

In an effort to make IGT more accessible to linguistic research, we try to extract original IGT from linguistic publications and in same cases we provide additional linguistic glosses through a subsequent layer of annotation using the TypeCraft Glosser. In this way we hope to contribute to the re-usability of this data.

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Keywords

• Adposition
• Preposition
• Postposition
• Serial Verb Construction
• Complements

Summary

In this article, the author argues that adposition classes; preposition and postposition exist in Ewe, a Niger-Congo language of the Kwa sub-branch spoken mainly in some parts of West Africa. It was written as a response to claims by other linguists that there can exist, only one of such categories in a language. This is shown in the table below (Example 1).

The article notes that prepositions in Ewe evolved from verbs in the context of serial verb constructions, and that, their distribution vary from their verbal sources:

• Complements of prepositions can be fronted (in focusing) leaving the preposition stranded (Example 2)

• Prepositions with their complements can be preposed and marked as scene-setting topics (Example 3)

• Verbs in series share the same aspect; prepositions are not marked for aspects (Example 4)

Postpositions on the other hand evolved from nouns, especially body part nouns and some landmark terms.

• Postpositions can neither occur as clausal arguments on their own (Example 5)

• Postpositions do not require the connective ‘fe’ in possessive constructions (Example 6)

• Postpositional phrases do not take dative prepositional arguments (Example 8)

However, like nouns, postpositional phrases can function as both subjects and objects (Example 7) and can be direct arguments of verbs (Example 9).

Glossed texts in the article

The following are glossed examples extracted from the article. They are linked to suggested annotations in the TC-wiki page by the writer of this page.

NAME lie bed-DEF upper-surface

NAME lean ALL bed-DEF 

NAME lie ground ALL bed-DEF upper_surface

road-DEF upper_surface-aFOC 1SG-find-3SG at

at road-DEF upper_surface-aFOC 1SG-find-3SG

1SG-find-3SG at road-DEF upper_surface

LOC country whole DEF IN TP 

NAME-aFOC COP person REL press-HAB skin take-HAB criminal-PL ALL out

PERL 3SG-DEM-PL all IN also TP 1SG-REP-find child-1SG

NAME crawl-HAB come_from-HAB room-DEF IN

2SG-aFOC be_at:PRES 3SG upper_surface

book-DEF be_at:PRES TV-DEF poss upper part

NAME crawl-HAB come_from room-DEF IN

moon be_at:PRES sky 

child-DEF poss head containing_region strike dirt

pot –DEF containing region become_good

NAME wash front DAT house-DEF

3SG-come building-DEF place

NAME wipe pot-DEF containing region

NAME wash face DAT child-DEF

3SG-come one_day_from_today

Related Articles

Dryer, Matthew S.. 2011. Order of Adposition and Noun Phrase. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, chapter 85. Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/85 Accessed on 2012-05-12.