Nordic Journal of African Studies

Abstract

This paper presents a discussion of Akan noun-noun compounds and a Construction Morphology account of their properties.Noun-noun compounds are the most studied type of compounds cross-linguistically, with studies revealing interesting issues about their nature, including their productivity, the variable semantic relations between the constituents, and the overall interpretation of the compounds.However, there is currently no study dedicated to the morphological and semantic properties of noun-noun compounds in Akan.Existing studies focus mainly on the phonology of Akan compounds and on other features like exocentricity in relation to which aspects of noun-noun compounds are discussed.Based on a dataset of over 200 Akan noun-noun compounds, this paper identifies various classes, including endocentric and exocentric types based on whether or not a head constituent is present.It is shown that the endocentric types are predominantly right-headed, consistent with observed crosslinguistic patterns.The range of possible interpretations of newly formed Akan noun-noun compounds also varies, depending on the semantic relation between the constituents and the pragmatic context, although for established compounds, there seem to be generally recognized fixed relations between the constituents that mediate their conventionalized interpretation.However, even they may be subject to other context-specific interpretations on occasion.Thus, for the Construction Morphology account, the relation between the constituents is specified as R at an abstract level, and spelt out concretely for compounds individually.