A Closer Look at the Akan Relativiser 1

A Closer Look at the Akan Relativiser 1

This paper provides an alternative viewpoint on the length and tone of the relativiser in Akan. The relativiser has been analysed as a long vowel with either a high-low tone (HL) (Saah, 2010) or a mid-low tone (McCracken, 2013). However, in this paper, we posit an underlying sho...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kofi Busia Abrefa
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: University of Ghana 2016-12-01
Series:Legon Journal of the Humanities
Subjects:
relative clause
relativiser
tone bearing unit
contour tone
vowel length
Description
Summary:This paper provides an alternative viewpoint on the length and tone of the relativiser in Akan. The relativiser has been analysed as a long vowel with either a high-low tone (HL) (Saah, 2010) or a mid-low tone (McCracken, 2013). However, in this paper, we posit an underlying short vowel with a low tone (L) for the relativiser. We further show that it receives a high tone (H) from an adjacent H; making it a syllable with a contour tone at the phonetic level (i.e. â). The contour tone then affects the length of the relativiser at the phonetic level, making it slightly longer than its original length.
ISSN:2458-746X

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