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24 - A Grammatical Sketch of Avatime (Kwa, Niger-Congo, Ghana)

from Part Five - Grammatical Sketches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2023

By
Saskia van Putten  and
Rebecca Defina
Edited by
Delia Bentley ,
Ricardo Mairal Usón ,
Wataru Nakamura  and
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr
Delia Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Ricardo Mairal Usón
Affiliation:
Universidad National de Educación a Distancia, Madrid
Wataru Nakamura
Affiliation:
Tohoku University, Japan
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
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Summary

This chapter provides a grammatical overview of Avatime, a Niger-Congo language spoken in the south-east of Ghana. The first part surveys lexical categories (parts of speech and major Aktionsart classes of predicates), syntactic structure (clause structure, grammatical operators, nominal structure, and adpositional structure), and focus structure, while the second part is devoted to describing and illustrating the rich variety of serial verb constructions in Avatime, identifying three types of juncture–nexus (nuclear cosubordination, core coordination, and core cosubordination), and investigating how the correspondences of these juncture–nexus relations and their semantic functions fit into the Interclausal Relations Hierarchy.

Keywords

Avatimeclause linkageserial verb constructions
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Role and Reference Grammar , pp. 889 - 913
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

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