Topics in the Grammar of Bago

Abstract

This thesis presents a detailed description and analysis of several topics in the grammar of Bago, a Gur language spoken in the central-eastern region of Togo. It covers areas in the phonology, syntax, and semantics of the language. The first chapter provides background information about the history and culture of the Bago people prior to giving an overview of the geographical location and classification of the language, previous literature, data collection, and the methodology used in this thesis. The second chapter describes the sound system and syllable structure of the language. It also analyzes the vowel harmony and tonal patterns in Bago nouns and verbs. Chapter three gives a brief overview of the grammar of Bago, and chapter four describes number suffixes, semantics and phonological processes observed in the five classes of nouns. The fifth chapter is concerned with personal pronouns, as well as the question of how to encode reflexivity and reciprocity. A discussion of (in)definiteness encoding is presented in chapter six, which also contains a description of the demonstrative morphemes in the language. Chapter seven deals with nominal modification expressed in the language by means of adjectival roots, predicative nominals, and intransitive verbs. In chapter eight, we investigate the distribution of the copular verbs and the distinction between dynamic and stative verbs. A preliminary description and analysis of the factative and the imperfective aspects are presented in chapter nine, while the following chapter aims to describe modality and conditionality. Chapter eleven is concerned with clausal and constituent negation. The final chapter examines lexical, morphological, and syntactic causative constructions in Bago.