A morphosyntactic analysis of adjectives in two Kwa languages: Ga and Dangme

The adjective category normally serves as attribute for the nouns in languages that do have them. The paper investigates the morphosyntactic properties of adjectives in two Kwa languages, Ga and Dangme. Both languages have derived and non-derived adjectives. The paper which is mainly descriptive, examines the similarities and differences that exist between these two Kwa languages in terms of their morphological and syntactic features. The paper reveals that though similarities exist in the occurrence of adjectives syntactically, there exist differences in their morphological properties. On the other hand, Ga and Dangme show agreement in terms of number with the head noun for all adjectives used attributively. The paper concludes that in both languages, adjective occur after the head noun in attributive position. Predication of adjectives can occur in nominal forms and the verbal equivalence is also employed in both languages. Plural marking in adjectives is through reduplication and affixation in Ga while in Dangme, it is only through affixation. Data for this paper were collected from both primary and secondary sources.