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Ameka, Felix Kofi (2012). Ewe: Its grammatical constructions and illocutionary devices. München: Lincom Europa.

Facsimile edition of the author’s PhD thesis, Australian National University (1991).

This thesis primarily provides an overview of Ewe grammar and a detailed investigation of the meanings of specific grammatical constructions and illocutionary devices in the language. The basic idea behind the study is that every grammatical and illocutionary construction or device encodes a certain meaning which can be discovered and stated so that the meanings of different devices can be compared not only within one language but across language boundaries. An attempt is made to explain the usage of grammatical forms from different perspectives. Priority is given to semantic, functional and discourse-pragmatic concerns although formal constraints and diachronic
considerations are also invoked in the explanations. A major concern throughout the thesis is to characterize the communicative competence of a native speaker of Ewe.

The body of the thesis is divided into four parts. Each part is preceded by a short overview about the rationale for its organisation.

Part I is a brief overview of the structural grammar of Ewe. It consists of three brief chapters. Chapter 1 contains introductory material about the language, the theoretical and methodological assumptions and the aims and organisation of the thesis. Chapter 2 describes the phonology while Chapters 3 and 4 provide information on the basic morphosyntax of Ewe. The other three parts are organised on the basis of three (macro-)functions (Halliday’s semantic metafunctions) of language: propositional, textual and interpersonal.

Part II is concerned with the grammatical coding of some cognitive domains: qualities or property concepts as coded by adjectivals (chapter 5); aspectual meanings, specifically the semantics of the ingressive and perfective aspect markers (chapter 6); and possession (chapter 7).

Part III examines the grammatical resources available to the Ewe speaker for structuring and packaging information in a clause. The constructions investigated here encode the different perspectives a speaker can assume with respect to how to present the message being conveyed or with respect to how a participant in the situation is conceptualized. Chapter 8 deals with scene-setting topic constructions. Chapter 9 describes “nyá-inverse” constructions and presents them in a typological perspective. Chapter 10 investigates the different ways of conceptualizing an ‘experiencer’ in Ewe through the different grammatical relations such an argument can assume in a clause.

Part IV is concerned with the illocutionary devices and constructions used in interpersonal communication. The description of the illocutionary devices is preceded by two chapters that serve as background for the understanding of the other chapters. Chapter 11 discusses the ethnography of speaking Ewe. Chapter 12 explores some theoretical issues in the analysis of illocutionary devices. The illocutionary devices are described in the remaining three chapters. Chapter 13 describes the modes of address in Ewe. Chapter 14 analyses various interactional speech formulae. This part – and the thesis – ends with an investigation of the significance of interjections (Chapter 15).

Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Ameka, Felix (1994). Ewe. In Cliff Goddard, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings (pp. 57-86). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.25.07ame

In general, Ewe seems to have lexical exponents for all of the proposed primitives. In several cases, the items correspond in a straightforward manner with the primitives and their combinatorial frames. In other cases, it is easy to identify a lexical exponent for a primitive, but the item is restricted in its range of use (i.e., it is not easy to use it in all of the proposed canonical context sentences). At the same time, it is shown that certain methodological issues need to be addressed. The first issue concerns allolexy; there is a need for clarification of this notion and of the situations in which it can be legitimately invoked. A second methodological issue relates to the translational approach in identifying the primitives across languages. A third and final problem concerns the conceptual status of the semantic primitives.

Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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