The Typology of Modal Expressions In Ga

Abstract

In this study, the paper provides a functional description of some modal expressions in Ga. Ga is a member of the Kwa branch of Niger-Congo languages and it is spoken in Ghana in Accra and its environs. Modal markers are used by speakers to show their opinion and attitudes toward the propositional content of utterances. The paper discusses the meaning and grammar of modal expressions in Ga within the domains of different types of modality. The concept of modality in linguistics is seen as a semantic category which is connected to the notions of necessity and possibility of states affairs as indicated in propositions. The methods in gathering data used include the study of a small corpus of written and spoken Ga comprising different types of texts, and two elderly speakers purposively sampled as well as an introspection of the native intuitions of the authors of the paper. The modal markers are extracted and examined in different contexts without any prejudgment as to whether they represent invariant or extended meanings. The result shows that Ga uses different types of expressive devices for the expression of modality. Among them are lexical forms such as adverbials and verbs (verbal constructions). The modal adverbs examined mostly expressed possibility or certainty and seemed to have a specific position in terms of syntax. Items within the different types of expressive devices express different types of modal meanings such as epistemic, deontic and dynamic modalities. Some of these different qualificational meanings are highly context-dependent and are linked with the expression of future time in the language. It is relevant for writers and speakers to therefore bring to the fore that decoding of some of these lexical categories are not only based on how they are stringed together, but the other lexical categories they co-occur with determine their meaning semantically and pragmatically.