A Morphosyntactic Analysis of Some Asante Weed Names

Abstract

This paper investigates the morphosyntactic features of some indigenous weed names identified among the Asante people of Ghana. Asante is a dialect of Akan and belongs to the Kwa (Congo-Niger) language family spoken mainly in Southern Ghana.  This paper discusses some forty-four (44) weed names in Asante. All the data used were collected from primary sources. The data were collected from twenty (20) native speakers of Asante through unstructured interviews. The study has revealed various morphological processes in the language that include affixation, reduplication, and compounding in terms of morphological structure. The weed names were morphologically structured as single words, di-morphemic, phrases and clauses reduced to weed names. Syntactically, these sentential names can be simple, compound, and complex sentences which can function as declarative and imperative sentences.