Visiting A Neglected Lexical Category: An Overview of Dagbani Adverbials

Abstract

This paper provides a descriptive overview of adverbials in Dagbani, a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in northern Ghana, focusing on their distributional characteristics and the possibilities of adverbial sequencing. We show that Dagbani adverbials occur in clause-initial, postverbal, and clause-final positions but are banned in the preverbal position. We also demonstrate that focalization and topicalization are instrumental in the occurrent of Dagbani adverbials in the sentential initial position. We further show that the default distributional property of Dagbani adverbials is the postverbal position, with the exception of the epistemic adverbials and the grammatical aspectual adverbials, which are disallowed in this position. Whereas the former category of adverbials occur only clause initially, the latter occur in the position immediately before the verb. Finally, we demonstrate that whereas certain adverbial combinations present a flexible linear ordering, some combinations occur in a fixed linear order, hence, do not give room for reordering. The descriptive approach employed in this paper enables us to provide an exhaustive analysis of the data presented without binding it to any formal syntactic theory, which may limit the discussions to its principles. The data used in this study are drawn from primary sources. Whereas some of the data are obtained from fieldwork, others are constructed based on the native intuitions of the authors.