Negation strategies in Gonja

Abstract

This thesis discusses the concept of negation strategies in Gonja, a Guan language spoken in the Savannah Region of Ghana. It focuses on how sentential, imperatives and constituent negation is marked in Gonja. Negation in Gonja is marked via the use of syntactic independent particles which come before the verb. The analysis is mainly descriptive and is cast within the theoretical framework of the Basic Linguistic Theory (BLT) by Dixon (2012). The study also examined the various preverbal particles used in the language for marking negation. Data for this thesis were collected from both primary and secondary sources. The primary data were drawn mainly from naturally occurring spoken texts (spontaneous speech) which were recorded from a Gonja speaking community in the East Gonja District dialect. The spontaneous data which were phone recorded were formally and informally transcribed for the analysis. These were supplemented by elicited data, as well as data based on my native speaker intuition. The secondary data were collected from some Gonja books. The findings in this study indicate that, Gonja employs one strategy for marking of negation. The overtly expressed negative markers are maa, maŋ, maaŋ, saŋ and manɛ used for negating declaratives and imperatives and constituent constructions respectively. The findings show that these preverbal negative markers interact with aspectual markers in the language. The findings further indicate that there is incompatibility between the progressive aspectual and future markers in Gonja negation. I conclude that in Gonja, there is no overt morpheme that is attached to the verb to mark the imperative mood.