The so-called Asante nominal suffixes: a re-analysis

The nominal suffixation, as a morphological process, has been discussed in existing literature on Akan as a phenomenon whereby in addition to the regular prefixation, where necessary, in verbal nominalization, the Asante dialect adds a mid vowel as a suffix to the already nominalized verb. This phenomenon has often been assumed to be idiosyncratic to the Asante dialect of Akan. The selection of these mid vowels as a nominal suffix is with recourse to the ATR and rounding values of the stem vowels. For example, a verb that ends in wu ‘to die’ /u/, which is specified for [+Round,+ATR] will invariably select for [o] as its suffix when nominalized in the Asante dialect. As the name suggests, it has been widely assumed that these suffixes exclusively co-occur with nominals in the Asante dialect. In this paper, we show that this long-standing assumption could not be correct. Withlanguage-internal examples, we demonstrate that these so-callednominal suffixes can also co-occur with other lexical categories including verbs, pronominals, postpositions (relator nouns) and demonstratives. It is therefore proposed in the present paper that on grounds of economy principles, it would suffice to simply term these suffixes the Asante suffixes instead of the oft-termed the Asante nominal suffixes in the existing literature.