Serial verb constructions in Krio and Akan

Abstract

This study focuses on serial verb constructions (SVC) in Krio and a comparison of Krio and Akan serial verb construction types. We present a Krio corpus consisting of recordings such as folktales, narratives, interviews and radio broadcasts as well as transcriptions from textbooks currently used in schools. The material has been partially annotated using the linguistic data management system TypeCraft. The core of this study is a systematic description of the Krio grammar, based on data from our corpus and informed by earlier studies of the language. Most of our data has been made public online and the corpus examples used in this study are directly linked to our corpus by hyperlinks. In the integrated analysis of our data, we focus on verbal constructions. We compare Krio SVC with Akan SVC and have a closer look at chaining and integrated SVCs in both languages. For Krio we further look at preverbs, light verbs and complex verbal expessions. We use Lexical Functional Grammar to outline the syntactic and functional structure of Krio chaining and integrated SVCs.