Analytical issues in the study of verb–noun compounds: How does Akan fit in?

Abstract

Abstract This paper highlights three issues in the study of verb–noun compounding and shows how data from Akan (Niger-Congo, Kwa, Ghana) help answer the relevant questions for the language. The issues, which mainly concern the exocentric subtype, are: one, the syntactic category of the left-hand constituent and that of the whole compound; two, whether the formation of verb–noun compounds is a matter of syntax or morphology; and three, how to distinguish between verb–noun compounds and verb phrases, given their structural similarity. Although these issues have come up somehow in the literature on Akan verb–noun compounds, they have not been deliberately targeted for discussion. This paper fills the gap. It is shown that the left-hand constituent is definitely a verb. This raises the question of how to account for the syntactic category of the exocentric subclass of the compound, given that the compound is not a hyponym of the right-hand nominal constituent whose syntactic category may be assumed to percola...