Abstract:
The use of multiple words to describe nouns is a common phenomenon in language and languages that have adjectives mostly employ this word class. Ga, a Kwa language of the Niger Congo branch, is no exception, whereas languages without adjectives may use other lexical categories like nouns and verbs which play the adjectival role. Ga has adjectives and employs them as attributives for nouns. The paper examines the syntactic rules governing the occurrence of several adjectives serving as attributes of a single head noun. In this paper the noun is considered the head of the Ga Nominal Phrase. The order of these adjectives has not received scholarly attention in Ga and this is to fill that gap in the literature. I argue that the order of adjectives is not haphazardly arranged but follows a laid down syntactic prescription. For instance, the data showed that Dimension adjectives normally occur in first position, whereas Colour adjectives occur further from the head noun. It was also revealed that in the ordering of adjectives in which value adjective is included, the Age adjective occurs in last position and Value adjective occurs first or last when included in the ordering of adjectives for a noun. Consequently, it is suggested that defying the arrangement in the ordering of the adjectives results in unacceptable forms. The adjectives are grouped according to semantic classes. Data are gathered from native speakers of Ga. The findings contribute to the existing literature on adjective sequencing in Ghanaian languages.
