Abstract:

The paper describes how verb stems in Lɛtɛ[1], (Kwa: Ghana) inflect for grammatical categories of tense/aspect, person, negation, mood and motion by employing prefixes. Studies of this nature have been documented with respect to related Kwa languages (Ameka & Kropp-Dakubu, 2008), but no such study has been published on Lɛtɛ, an under-documented language, hence the significance of this paper. Verbal prefixes which are employed to mark the categories include the future morpheme, /bÈ-/; the progressive marker, /dÉ-/; the perfect aspect prefix, /yÈÉ-/; and for negation, the prefix/ bÉ-/. Similarly, other verbal prefixes are used to signal person, mood and motion. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates the influence of the [+/-ATR] vowel harmony principles; homorganic assimilation, and the phonological structure of the verb stem on the surface representation of the prefixes. Data for the study are drawn from a database of Lɛtɛ verb lists and folktales recorded in the speech community by the author, and supplemented with elicitations. The paper adds novel data to the existing literature on the function of verbal affixes in marking inflectional categories in Kwa languages in particular, and the world’s languages in general.

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