Expressing Property Concepts in Dagaare

Abstract

This study investigates Property Concepts (PCs) in Dagaare using the Framework-free Grammatical theory (Haspelmath 2008). The study examines four main syntactic categories namely adjectives, verbs, nouns and adverbs that are used to express property concepts in Dagaare. The morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of these four categories were investigated. The instruments used include tape recorders and native intuition. The study revealed that three of the four major word classes in English can be used to express property concepts-nouns, adverbs and adjectives. The only one that was not found in the oral corpusto have expressed property concepts is the verb. Data was collected from only primary sources. This was made up of twelve (12) live recordings of native speakers of Dagaare in Wa and Jirapa. From the 12 recordings, 3 were found to have structures in which a noun, adverb and adjective each were used to express PCs. The verb was never used in any structure to express PCs. A further study in this area regarding the verb and property concepts would be worth undertaking.