I’m preparing for my first elicitation sessions today. I’m eager to get started – it feels like I’ve been here forever laying groundwork for this, already, and now finally I get to start.
For those who don’t know: I’m here to do fieldwork on a language called Twi, spoken by a large percentage of the population in this area of Ghana. In particular, I’m going to be working on Serial Verb Constructions (SVC) and their various forms, though obviously I’ll look into anything else interesting that comes up. SVCs are a very common cross-linguistic phenomenon that we don’t have in English at all, wherein multiple verbs are used in one sentence to express a single predicate, without any sort of subordination (if, because) or coordination (and). To give an example: The predicate “to bring” is often broken down into the verbs take come, so that the full sentence might look something like “I take book come.” to mean “I bring the book.”
There are a lot of interesting questions about SVCs in Twi that I would like to find answers for. Here are just a few:
- What semantic categories of SVC exist in Twi? Many SVCs can express, for instance, resultative (“I paint the house red.”) or sequential (“I cooked then food then ate it.”) meaning.
- How do they interact with tense/aspect marking? Which verb gets marked? How do these interact semantically with the categories above?
- How to adverbs attach to the SVC? Which verb do they modify (or can you choose)?
- How many verbs can you get in a sentence?
- How do SVCs interact with multiple-part verbs? Many verbs in Twi come in two separable parts. For instance, “to sing” is expressed as “to nyom“, lit. “throw song”; the notion of a conversation being on a particular topic is expressed as “dzina __ so” “stand __ on”, where the topic comes between the two parts.
Those are just a few of the questions I’ll be starting to look into today. This first session, though, is mostly about establishing a baseline: There are several distinct dialects of Twi, and there’s a high probability that my speakers today will speak a different one than what I’m familiar with, so I’ll have to spend some time confirming the vocabulary I already have built up.
Can’t wait to get started.