Ameka, Felix K. (2007). He died old dying to be dead right: Transitivity and semantic shifts of ‘die’ in Ewe in crosslinguistic perspective. In Melissa Bowerman & Penelope Brown (Eds.), Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability (pp. 231-253). Mahwah: Erlbaum.
This chapter examines the structure and semantics of the equivalent of ‘die’ in Ewe, a Kwa (Niger–Congo) West African language, against the backdrop of universalist expectations about such a verb. It also discusses the potential problems the Ewe verb may pose to the learner and to theories of verb learning. In particular, it is demonstrated that the Ewe verb kú ‘die’ is not just a one-participant verb, as is universally expected of verbs that represent a dying situation, but it is also a two-place verb, that is, a transitive verb. Some syntactic and semantic properties of ‘die’ predicates are presented from a crosslinguistic perspective. The variation in behavior that we find means that there is very little about ‘die’ predicates that can be attributed to innate knowledge. The focus then shifts to the argument structure properties of the verb kú ‘die’ in Ewe. The semantic shift that ‘die’ predicates undergo from ‘die’ to ‘intensity’ and ‘desiderative’ (which can be positive or negative) is reviewed, as well as the attendant syntactic ramifications. Such shifts provide further evidence that the language learner cannot be guided by a simple form–meaning pairing. The chapter concludes with potential learnability problems.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
