ebookslkp.blogg.se - Morphological and distributional criteria

(We count as postverbal modifiers all phrases that occur after the sentence’s main verb, with the exception of several special cases discussed in 12.2 below where noun phrases without a postposition can occur postverbally in a number of functions: secondary object, nominal predicate, floating quantifiers, and arguments of gṵ̄à̰ ‘to stay, to be left’. All postverbal modifiers can also function as predicates in locative sentences, see 12.4. One could also rely on other nominal positions such as the subject position however, the subject slot is less appropriate to use in an operational definition of nominal status because, being leftmost in the clause, it is not always superficially distinct from the topic slot.ĥThe postverbal modifier position is characteristic for adverbs, and for postpositions the core context is combination with a noun phrase into a postverbal sentential modifier. Let me now proceed to the description of distributional classes of Beng nominals and adverbials.ĤI take the direct object position as the distinctively nominal position in Beng. Therefore part of speech criteria have to be purely distributional. PostpositionsģBeng lacks dedicated nominal morphology that would mark case, number, definiteness, or agreement, even if some of those notions are not entirely alien to Beng grammar (see 8.3, 9 below). kàklàkà ‘enormous,’ gbɛ̀gblɛ̀gbɛ̀ ‘big and flat’, jàjràjà ‘huge’ (of a person), kɛ́klɛ́kɛ́ ‘thin’, kèklèkè ‘hard on the inside’, pàplàpà ‘wide and flat’, píplípí/pìplìpì ‘fat and short’. There is also a pattern, probably of Baule origin, of apparently onomatopoetic adjectives CVClVCV where all consonants (stops), vowels and tones have to match, e.g. cócó ‘gnash’, kúkù ‘cry of wild pigeon’, bà ‘sound of machete’ and that seem to be able to be included in larger syntactic structures, and of interjections like bɔ́cɛ́ and cróló ‘exactly!’, or èé ‘oh really!’. Let me note only the existence of onomatopoetic words that imitate various noises, e.g. Let me now turn to the distributional criteria that allow us to distinguish parts of speech within the inflectionally invariable class.Ģ I avoid here any discussion of ideophones in Beng which may constitute one or several additional grammatical classes. 1 Inflectional criteria differentiate only three classes of words in Beng: personal pronouns, verbs, and inflectionally invariable words (I’m setting aside the problematic inflectional status of reduplication for the moment).