The syntax and semantics of cooking verbs in Dagbani

Abstract

This study examined the syntax and semantics of Dagbani cooking verbs, a Mabia language spoken in Northern Ghana. The study further examined the distributions of these cooking verbs, taking into account the issue of collocation and the case of transitivity. The study further explored the basic and extended semantics of Dagbani cooking verbs. Adopting the idea of Lehrer (1969), the study identified various dimensions of eliciting the culinary terms through [± features] in Dagbani. Data for this thesis were collected from both primary and secondary sources. The primary data were collected through semi-structured interviews, and self-generated data through native speaker intuition. The secondary data were collected from some Dagbani books including Dagbani dictionaries. Cognitive Linguistics is adopted for the analysis of Dagbani cooking verbs in this study. The activity-based cooking verbs are the prototypical verbs that make the food ready for consumption while the process-based assist the activity based to facilitate the cooking. In addition, it is established that the cooking verbs do not collocate with all the food items in Dagbani. However, the choice of a verb depends on the type of food selected to cook. It is also revealed that all the Dagbani cooking verbs are naturally transitive. However, the intransitive forms demand some affixes to function syntactically. It is also revealed that some of the verbs go beyond the basic meanings they represent. The verb duɣi 'cook' as the general term has extensions into more other domains than the other verbs. The data revealed that the cooking verbs can be extended to refered emotions, health status of the speaker, body temperature, children playing such as reciting folktales, swimming among others.