Topics in Kwa Syntax

This book grew out of a concern we have had that very many theoretical and descriptive work on the Kwa languages were not accessible to the general linguistic community. As a result, these languages were only referred to in the context of very specific discussions such as serial verb constructions. But as the reader of this book will notice, syntactic topics discussed in the context of Kwa range from bare nouns, relative clauses, negation, discourse markers and the interaction with the clausal periphery, to argument structure. Many issues remain that need to be brought to the fore of the community and we hope that this book will trigger the curiosity of the reader to get to know more about these languages. Much of the work presented here could not have been possible without the help of many colleagues and the contri- tors whom we thank warmly for joining this enterprise. We are also grateful to the editors of the series, Marcel den Dikken, Joan Maling, Liliane Haegeman to have offeredus this platform to initiate the debate about Kwa. We will also like to thank Helen van der Stelt and Jolanda Voogd from Springer for their kind collaboration and patience. We are also very grateful to Joscelyn Essegbey and Leston Buell for helping with editing the manuscript. Enoch, O. Aboh James Essegbey v Contents 1 The Phonology Syntax Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Enoch, O. Aboh and James Essegbey 2 The Morphosyntax of the Noun Phrase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Enoch, O.

Edited by two leading experts on the languages of West Africa, this volume is the very first book to handle a range of topics in the syntax of Kwa, a branch of the Niger-Congo language family spoken by approximately 20 million people in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin and in the extreme southwestern corner of Nigeria. Kwa includes a total of 45 related languages. The nine chapters each address a separate grammatical aspect of Kwa. These range from topics such as the verb phrase, argument structure, verb serialization and complex predicates, to discussions on tense, mood, and aspect and their relation to the structure of sentences. Also addressed are the structure of the noun phrase and the syntax of discourse particles.

The studies in this volume demonstrate that Kwa languages offer a very rich empirical domain for linguistic theorizing. In this book, experts who are mostly native speakers present empirical data and show its theoretical relevance to comparativelinguistics and comparative syntax. The book brings together a wealth of material and fresh insights and is a superb example of how empirical research feeds into typological and theoretical linguistics. As such, it is a gold mine to students and teachers of comparative syntax, as well as for anyone interested in studies on Niger Congo languages.