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Typological Features Template for Southern Dagaare

Revision as of 07:43, 26 March 2010 by John Ganaah (Talk | contribs)

Mark Ali, University of Education, Winneba

John Ganaah

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

Morpho-syntactic Features
morphological classification (1)
morphological classification (2) head independant marking as in doolee, doo (man), lee (small) = boy
Nominal Phrases
syntactic structure DET-POSS N ADJ- DEM- INT- QUANT- LOC- NP
nominal modification
nominal specification There are determiners, demonstratives(distal and proximal), intensifiers,quantifiers and numerals in Dagaare.Deixis and reference are expressed using the nominal forms determiners(articles),possessives, demonstratives and pronouns together with some particles.
possession Possession is not overtly marked in Dagaare.It is illustrated by the use of possessive pronoun and juxtaposition.A (possessive)pronoun may occur with a head noun to indicate possession,e.g. "fo bie" meaning "your child".Where two nouns occur in juxtaposition, the first noun is the possessive noun and the second is the head noun,e.g."Ayuo bie" meaning "Ayuo`s child".
pronominal system Dagaare pronouns are marked for subject and object function. For personal pronouns,Dagaare makes a two-way distinction between subject pronouns-strong forms and weak forms. For example,the first person singular subject 'n' is a weak form.Its strong counterpart is 'maa' and its objective or accusative form is 'ma'.The following is a list of the pesonal pronouns of Dagaare in their subject and object forms respectively: 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.”
Iri
iri
get_up
V
gaa
gaa
go
V2
gaŋ
gaŋ
sleep
V3
Adpositions
Complementation
Special Properties of Soutern Daagare