Basic and extended uses of posture verbs in Gurenɛ

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the basic postural meanings and extended locative uses of three posture verbs : gã ‘be lying’, zĩ ‘be sitting’, and ze’ ‘be standing’ in Gurenɛ (Gur, Niger-Congo) spoken in and around Bolga in Northern Ghana, West Africa. The paper explores the use of these verbs from a cognitive linguistics perspective. The basic meanings of the posture verbs correlate with how the speaker conceptualizes the spatial relation of the Figure and Ground based on some image schematic abstractions of the locative scene. They include the speaker’s background knowledge of the referent scene, the spatial relationship between the two entities, and his or her conceptualisation of the posture based on his or her socio-cultural background experience. The extension of the basic meanings to describe the position of animate non-human (animals) and inanimate entities (objects) reflects how the Gurenɛ speaker conceptualises and categorises non-human entities based on some related characteristic features between their body positions and that of humans. A unique feature of the Gurenɛ phenomenon is that the posture of humans or other entities located on elevated Grounds leads the speaker to conceptualise the scene from a different perspective which blocks the use of posture verbs and calls for the use of different positional verbs, such as yagi ‘be on top, with base support’, dɔgi ‘be on top, with unstable base support, and pagi ‘be on top, of flat or flexible objects’.