| Abstrakt: |
This paper provides an overview of lexical and clausal nominalization in Esahie, a relatively underdescribed and undocumented Kwa language. We show that in Esahie, lexical nominalizations lose all verbal properties whilst clausal nominalizations retain certain verbal features. Overall, nominalization in Esahie is typically a case of lexical rather than clausal nominalization. Lexical nominalizations in Esahie may take the form of simple affixation, parasynthesis or compounding. We also provide further empirical support against Aronoff's (1976) Unitary Base Hypothesis and show that certain inflectional operators in Esahie belong to the group of word-class-changing inflectional markers (cf. Haspelmath 1996; Bauer 2004). Data used in this work emanates from a series of fieldworks conducted in the Western-North region of Ghana, and the argumentation approach adopted is descriptive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
