Property Concepts in Ga

Abstract

Property concept words (PCs) are lexical items in a language that play adjectival role. The paper examined the morphological and syntactic properties of three word classes in Ga, a Kwa language, of the Niger Congo branch. The paper established that though there are adjectives in Ga which commonly play the adjectival roles, nouns and verbs can also perform that function. Morphologically, most of the adjectives used as property concepts agreed with the head noun in number, with the exception of those adjectives whose sources were mainly from nouns and a few that are derived from verbs. Verbs that are employed to express property concepts were mainly stative and may not necessarily agree with the subject but always express a property of whatever noun is found in the subject position The paper postulates that two categories of nouns play this role in Ga syntactically. The first category precedes the head noun and the second occurs after the head noun. Syntactically, the attributive role of PCs is played by the three categories. Data analyzed were from students in University of Education, Winneba and native speakers. The Dixon Framework was applied in the paper