This paper presents a pilot instrumental study of phonetic reduction of noun class suffi xes in Akebu (Kwa, Ghana-Togo mountain, West Africa). Noun class suffi xes starting with a glide are regularly perceived as omitted or almost omitted, and therefore full and reduced variants can be distinguished for such nouns. A formant measurement of fi nal parts of full and reduced forms of the same nouns has shown that, fi rst, for a given fi nal part of a noun stem the reduced variant is phonetically close to the corresponding full variant and, second, for a given fi nal part of a noun stem the forms with reduction of different suffi xes are phonetically different.

This article presents the results of an intragenetic crosslinguistic study of serial verb constructions (SVCs) in Kwa. Based on a sample of 28 Kwa languages, the article examines the crucial morphosyntactic features of Kwa SVCs and the range of meanings of the two most common grammaticalized types of Kwa SVCs, ‘take’ and ‘give’ SVCs. The morphosyntactic features of SVCs considered include unity of subject, unity of TAM, unity of negation, and absence of an overt marker of a syntactic relation. The three types of ‘take’ SVCs – lative ‘take’ SVCs, instrumental ‘take’ SVCs, and objectal ‘take’ SVCs – are treated separately. Uses of different types of ‘take’ SVCs and of ‘give’ SVCs turn out to be subject to implicational cross-Kwa restrictions that are formulated via hierarchies or semantic maps. Significant crosslinguistic variation is discovered, and it is argued that sometimes the similarities between Kwa languages can be most naturally explained by independent development.

Together with other Northern Samoyedic languages, Enets shows a crosslinguistically unusual way of expressing benefactive semantics. The Enets benefactive construction consists of a specific “destinative” affix that marks the presence of a beneficiary in a given clause and of a possessive affix that marks the beneficiary itself. Both affixes are attached to one of the verb's arguments. This makes the beneficiary encoded as an adnominal dependent of the verb's argument. This paper has two goals. Firstly, a detailed description of the Enets benefactive construction is provided, including its morphology, morphosyntax, and peculiarities of the differential object marking. Secondly, we aim to establish crosslinguistic parallels with the Enets benefactive construction. While phenomena with similar semantic features have been attested in the world's languages, we show that the Enets construction demonstrates a unique set of semantic and morphosyntactic properties.

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This article presents an overview of the numeral system in Akebu, a Kwa language of Togo. The Akebu numeral system is a decimal one and contains simple numerals from ‘1’ to ‘9’ and decimal bases for ‘10’, ‘100’, and ‘1,000’. The former have noun class agreement markers, while the latter do not. Only some noun classes are compatible with numerals, but among them there are both plural and singular classes.