Rogers Krobea Asante

University of Education, Winneba · Applied Linguistics

This dissertation presents the first comprehensive description of the grammar (broadly defined) of Nkami, an endangered, unwritten Niger-Congo (Kwa) language spoken by approximately 400 people in Amankwa, a resettlement community in the Afram Plains of Ghana's Eastern Region, West Africa.

1 This paper explores the grammatical pathway through which the future tense marker bɛ-evolved in Nkami, a lesser-studied Kwa language of Ghana. The analysis is based on synchronic natural data drawn from an extensive corpus collected during a language documentation project focusing on both the language and its speakers. It reveals that Nkami's fut...

This contribution extracts from a large corpus of elicited and naturalistic data to comprehensively discuss the resources that speakers of Nkami (Kwa, Niger-Congo) use to express property concepts. It reveals that the language employs eight distinct resources namely (underived) adjectives, verbs, nouns, nominal adjectives, verbal adjectives, posses...

This article extracts from synchronic data to systematically discuss focus clause constructions (FCCs) of Nkami, an endangered Kwa language of Ghana. It deals with issues that are of general interest in focus, syntax, typology, animacy and grammaticalization. It shows that Nkami exhibits both in-situ and ex-situ FCCs but, like most West African lan...

Using synchronic natural data, this paper provides a systematic descriptive account of nominalizations in Nkami, a less studied Guang (Kwa, Niger-Congo) language of Ghana. The data for the study were extracted from a large corpus collected from a documentation project on the language and people. I discuss the types of nominalizations, the strategie...

In this paper I comprehensively discuss the syntactic phenomenon of coordination in Nkami, an endangered, less known Guang (Kwa, Niger-Congo) language of Ghana, based on synchronic natural data. I discuss issues including Nkami’s coordination strategies, its number and types of coordinators, morpho-phonological make-up and distributional abilities...

Ghana Journal of Linguistics 7.1 (2018)

This paper introduces a group of people and an endangered language called Nkami. I discuss issues concerning the historical, geo-political, religious, socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds of the people. Among others, it is shown that Nkami is a South-Guang language spoken by approximately 400 people in a resettlement community in the Afram Plai...

This paper discusses the mechanisms for expressing location in Nkami, a lesser known Kwa language of Ghana. It is the outcome of a study of a large corpus of natural data, observations in the field, and responses gathered through the use of the `Topological Relation Picture Series (TRPS)' elicitation tool (Bowerman & Pederson 1993). It shows that N...

This paper provides a systematic descriptive account of relative clause constructions (RCCs) of Nkami, an endangered Ghanaian language, based on synchronic data. It addresses issues that are of general interest in relativization, typology, syntax and grammaticalization. Among other things, it is observed that in Nkami’s RCCs both the head noun and...

Drawing from synchronic natural data, this paper canvasses complement clause constructions (CCC) of Nkami, an endangered Kwa language of Ghana. It raises issues that are of general concern in complementation, syntax, typology and grammaticalization. Among other things, it comes out that unlike other Kwa languages which have only one explicit comple...

This paper draws from a large corpus of natural data to provide a descriptive account of vowel harmony in Nkami, an endangered undocumented Guang (Kwa) language of Ghana. Like most Kwa languages, Nkami has nine phonemic vowels with robust ATR harmony. Besides ATR harmony, it also shows evidence of rounding and height harmonies though the latter are...

Drawing from a large corpus of synchronic natural data, this paper provides a detailed descriptive account of animacy distinctions in Nkami, an endangered Ghanaian language, spoken in the Afram Plains of Ghana. It demonstrates the remarkable linguistic resources that speakers employ to distinguish animates from inanimates, to a large extent, and hu...

This paper canvasses two main cognitive projections, metaphor and metonymy, within the cognitive approach. It attempts to discover the cognitive basis which speakers of Akan employ to talk about abstract concepts including emotions and attributes. It discovers that these domains are best expressed in metaphtonymic language using body parts. Moreove...

This paper examines some aspects of nasalization in Nkonya, a Guang language spoken in the mid-part of Volta Region of Ghana, by the use of the framework of autosegmental phonology. It specifically examines the important role of the syllable in explaining the phenomenon of nasalization and also tentatively postulates that the feature [+nasal] is in...