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Part of
Predication in African Languages
Edited by James Essegbey and Enoch O. Aboh
[Studies in Language Companion Series 235] 2024
► pp. 263–283

Chapter 10
From injecting to planting

The semantics of dó

| University of Florida

Ewe, like many Kwa languages, has very few verbs. Some of them are said to be meaningless or light because they either do not have a translation equivalent in Standard Average European languages (SAE) or, where they do, they appear on the surface to have several meanings. In this paper, I discuss one of these verbs, namely dó. Although Westermann (1933) has only one entry for dó, he provides more than 20 subentries all with different categories of internal arguments. The entries include ‘to stretch out’, ‘trade’, ‘lend’, ‘fix a price’, and ‘plant. Rongier (2015), on the other hand, has more than a hundred entries for dó. Following Ameka (2019), I argue that while the multiple interpretations are presented in the dictionaries as though they are different meanings, they are actually contextual interpretations. I argue that when the argument structure constructions in which the verb occurs, and the semantics of the arguments with which it occurs are taken into consideration, many of the different interpretations that are provided for dó fall out from one invariant meaning.

Keywords: argument structure construction, dó, Ewegbe, monosemy, verb semantics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Dictionary-based analysis
  • 3.Separating meaning from interpretation
  • 4.On the semantics of dó
    • 4.1One-place construction with dó
    • 4.2Two-place with dó
      • 4.2.1Dó with items of clothing
      • 4.2.2Dó with plants
      • 4.2.3Dó with solid food
      • 4.2.4Dó with needles and tobacco
      • 4.2.5Dó with non-count entities
      • 4.2.6Dó with price
      • 4.2.7Dó with money
      • 4.2.8Dó with debt
      • 4.2.9Dó with voice
      • 4.2.10Dó with directional ɖa or allative prepositional phrase
      • 4.2.11Dó with emotions
    • 4.3Three-place construction with dó
    • 4.4Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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