SPATIAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN DAGBANLI

The paper discusses spatial constructions in Dagbanli, a Mabia language spoken in the northern part of Ghana. It is premised on cognitive linguistic approach in which meaning is extended when grammaticalization accounts for meanings tied to bodily parts, time and location. The ethnographic approach is employed to solicit the data used for this paper. The paper aims to describe how space is marked in Dagbanli, how body part nouns are used in spatial construction and how to find out the semantics of the space marker in Dagbanli. These are achieved by describing positional posture verbs and locative verbs, which indicate adposition in the language.