Difference between revisions of "The Akan verb kɔ"

Revision as of 12:55, 4 June 2009

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One of the difficult issues when annotation Akan is to decide how to annotate the two verbs bɛ and kɔ. Both verbs occur as independent verbs, meaning come and go respectively and as verbal prefixes adding aspectual information. Kɔ may in addition occur in connection with a noun denoting a place or a location. In the latter case Kɔ seems to express directionality in addition to movement.

TypeCraft hosts at present 37 sentences from Akan that contain kɔ; either as an independent verb or as a verbal prefix. Notice that some of these sentences come from Abron (Bono) which is one of the dialects of Akan. You can easily search the database yourself by going to Search for Phrases where you enter kɔ in the field: 'Extract morpheme' under the heading Morpheme Level. A list of 37 sentences will appear. You in addition receive information about the annotator and about the date the information was entered into the database. A free translation into English for each of the sentences might help you to further sort the information.

For the following discussion I have exported all 37 sentences into this wiki. This function is accessible from the bottom of the TC search page. A function that I often use is to export a larger set of sentences (30 -40 sentences) which I suspect are potentially interesting. I export them as html. This way I can view them in my browser. I find it easy this way to make a first classification of the data. In our case for example I used the browser view to distinguish between examples that show Kɔ in its function as a verbal predicate and those uses where it functions as an aspectual marker.

Let us first look at sentence (1) and (2) which exemplify the use of kɔ as in independent verb meaning go.

(1) (2) The next three sentences illustrate that kɔ may describe manner of movement as well as the directedness of the movement towards a given endpoint. Using terminology introduced by Talmy one could say that kɔ is neither head nor satellite marking but instead combines both functions by indicating manner and path of movement in one lexical item. Notice that the English translations given by native speaker annotators try to capture this fact, leading to slightly awkward translations such as He left Accra to Kumasi (meaning: going to Kumasi) or He passed by the school to church (meaning: going to church)

(3) (3) is interesting for others reasons too. Ato is said to have taken his piano to town. I was wondering if sɛnkuo possibly refers to one of the African instruments shown in the picture of African music instruments to the right? --Dorothee 00:04, 4 June 2009 (CEST)

Could Ato's piano have been a Sanza?

The read square-shaped instrument in the middle of the picture is a Sanza which is a small thumb piano. The white element fixed to the body of the instrument are depressed and released to produce the sound. This would be an instrument that easily could be taken along by the player.

Perhaps somebody reading this knows the answer?!

Sentence (4) below shows clearly that kɔ remains a verb since it does inflect for past tense also in its function as a spatial expression. (4) (5) Although as discussed above kɔ may combine the expression of manner of movement and path of movement this is not always the case. In (6) below Akan used kɔ together with the verb expressing manner of movement, just as if it were a well-behaved satellite marking language, again using Talmy's terminology. The only difference to Germanic satellite-marking languages in this case is that the 'satellite'-expression is headed by a verbal predicate rather than a prepositional one.

(6) Let us know identify a third function of kɔ, which the annotator has chosen to gloss with INGR standing for ingressive. Ingressive in this context refers to a situational aspect and means 'entering into an event'.

We are at this point not sure if this is the right annotation and invite comments that will help us to better distinguish the different meanings of kɔ and in particular to identify correctly the aspectual use of this verb. So please consider example (7) below

(7)