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    Relative clauses in Asante Twi

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    Author
    McCracken, Chelsea
    Date
    2013-11
    Abstract
    Relative clauses in Twi, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Ghana, have received little attention in the literature. I examine a corpus of naturally-occurring relative clauses, collected from a native speaker living in Houston, TX, to describe and analyze the tone, morphosyntax, and discourse characteristics of Twi relative clauses. This research also contributes to understanding of the cross-linguistic accessibility of noun phrases to the process of relativization. Based on spectrographic comparison within a set of minimal clauses, I determine that the phonemic form of the relativizer is āà. I examine the “optional” use of the relative clause enclitic no using a framework similar to Fox and Thompson’s (1990, 2007) studies on English relative clauses, concluding that the enclitic is only used in about half of cases and that the conditioning environment depends on a number of discourse factors including the topic-worthiness of the relativized argument and the distance between the head noun and the end of the relative clause. Finally, I examine noun phrase accessibility in Twi according to Keenan and Comrie (1977), finding that Twi relative clauses contradict Keenan and Comrie’s Accessibility Hierarchy Constraints in two respects: Twi resumptive pronouns are obligatory in the relativization of subjects, and the use of the resumptive pronoun strategy in Twi relativization covers a discontinuous portion of the Accessibility Hierarchy.
    Citation
    McCracken, Chelsea. "Relative clauses in Asante Twi." Rice Working Papers in Linguistics, 4, (2013) Rice University: https://hdl.handle.net/1911/75164.
    Keyword
    relative clauses; Asante Twi; language typology; language documentation and description
    Type
    Journal article
    Publisher
    Rice University
    Citable link to this page
    https://hdl.handle.net/1911/75164
    Rights
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
    Link to License
    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/
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    • Rice Working Papers in Linguistics, volume 4 [7]

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    Home | FAQ | Contact Us | Privacy Notice | Accessibility Statement
    Managed by the Digital Scholarship Services at Fondren Library, Rice University
    Physical Address: 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005
    Mailing Address: MS-44, P.O.BOX 1892, Houston, Texas 77251-1892
    Site Map