A holistic constructional view of the syntactic category of Akan compounds

What is it about?

This paper presents a completely new way of looking at the output syntactic category of Akan compounds. All previous studies of Akan compounds observed that Akan compounds are invariably nominal. Thus, no matter the syntactic category of the constituents, the compound that is formed will be a noun. The approach to accounting for this fact has been to posit abstract nominalizers which turn either the output or one of the constituent into a nominal so that the nominal. The approach in the present paper is that the nominal syntactic category is a property of a compounding schema which is pre-specified to carry an output category - noun. Thus every compound will be nominal because it inherits this syntactic category from the schema. The Theory of Construction Morphology (CxM) makes it possible to capture this elegantly.

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Why is it important?

It presents an innovative, theoretically informed approach to the analysis of the syntactic category of Akan compounds.

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