A Morphosyntactic Analysis of Some Asante Weed Names

Abstract

This paper investigates the morphosyntactic features of some indigenous weed names identified among the Asante people of Ghana. Asante is a dialect of Akan and belongs to the Kwa (Congo-Niger) language family spoken mainly in Southern Ghana. This paper discusses some forty-four (44) weed names in Asante. All the data used were collected from primary sources. The data were collected from twenty (20) native speakers of Asante through unstructured interviews. The study has revealed various morphological processes in the language that include affixation, reduplication, and compounding in terms of morphological structure. The weed names were morphologically structured as single words, di-morphemic, phrases and clauses reduced to weed names. Syntactically, these sentential names can be simple, compound, and complex sentences which can function as declarative and imperative sentences.

‘Refuse Dump, Hurry Up!’: A Cognitive Onomastic and Cultural Metaphor Perspective of Nzema Death-Prevention Names

“…Broadly speaking, onomastics deals with the study of names (Algeo 1992). It covers 'anthroponyms' (the study of personal names), 'toponyms' (the study of place names), 'ethnonyms' (names that are used to refer to ethnic groups or tribes), and 'hydronyms' (names given to rivers and water bodies) as well as plant names, pet names, company names, brand names, and church names, among others (Algeo and Algeo 2000;Yakub 2020;Akuamah 2021;Akoto 2023). As Reszegi (2023) mentions, cognitive onomastics is a relatively new approach to the study of proper names based on a cognitive approach to language, using the assumptions of cognitive linguistics and other cognitive sciences.…”