Noun-noun in compounds in Dagaare
Keywords:
Dagaare, Endocentric/Exocentric compounds, Construction Morphology, MabiaAbstract
This paper presents a Construction Morphology account of Noun-Noun compounds in Dagaare, a Mabia language spoken in parts of northern Ghana, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast. Based on primary and secondary data drawn from a variety of sources, the formal structure of Dagaare noun-noun compounds is discussed, showing that Dagaare noun-noun compounds can be made up of simplex or complex nouns, including derived nouns and other compound nouns. Turning to the implicit relations holding between the constituents of noun-noun compounds, it is shown that the underpinning semantic relations may include PART-OF, MEANT-FOR, LOCATION-OF, INGREDIENT-FOR, and MADE-OF/FROM. The study also classifies compounds based on the presence and position of a head element within the compound, yielding both right-headed and left-headed endocentric noun-noun compounds as well as exocentric compounds. It is shown, however, that exocentric compounds are quite few in the dataset used for the present study, and possibly the whole language, and they are normally interpreted metaphorically since they tend to be non-compositional.
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