Lexical Nominalization in Ewe: A Morphosyntactic View

This paper studies action nominalization in Ewe, according to Comrie and Thompson’s (2007) categorization: action/state nominalization, agentive nominalization, instrumental nominalization, manner nominalization, locative nominalization, and objective nominalization. It investigates how these nominalization types manifest in the language. The paper finds out that the above-mentioned nouns are derived, mainly, through the processes of reduplication and suffixation. Again, a single form can qualify for more than one category of noun, as in the case of the suffix -ʄe for deriving process/action and locative noun. Agentive noun can be derived by an agentive marker, -lá́́. The paper introduces time nominal, which denote the time for ‘verbing’ or the time that an action or activity takes place. Time nominal can mark the time for an event, season, or duration. Finally, the paper argues that a single verb phrase permed with different suffixes can derive a range of nouns in Comrie and Thompson’s (2007) framework.