A survey of property encoding expressions in Nkami

This contribution extracts from a large corpus of elicited and naturalistic data to comprehensively discuss the resources that speakers of Nkami (Kwa, Niger-Congo) use to express property concepts. It reveals that the language employs eight distinct resources namely (underived) adjectives, verbs, nouns, nominal adjectives, verbal adjectives, possessive constructions, relative clauses, and metaphtonymic expressions to express both attributive and predicative property, with the most pervasive being the verbs, possessive constructions and relative clauses. Only three of them are used to express both attributive and predicative property concepts, while the rest are used for one property function only. While physical property constitutes the most dominant concept expressed by these resources, only four of them permit serialization. Nkami belongs to the type 2 of Dixon's (2010) classification of languages, since its adjectives share common grammatical features with nouns. Though the majority of these strategies are common in other regional languages, Nkami is distinct from many of them, for example, Akan, in using possessive and verbal adjectives to code predicative and attributive property concepts respectively. Apart from telling Nkami's own story about how it signals property concepts, this study provides extraordinary data and analyses, which will go a long way in contributing to our cross-linguistic typological understanding of property encoding expressions.

Keywords: Nkami, Kwa language family, Property encoding expressions, Predicative property, Attributive property