Verbal inflection in Kwawu Akan

Abstract

Morphological processes in Kwawu are argued to be governed by a condition which states that words are morphologically analyzable only in terms of properties of the head of the word. The head of an affiixed word is the most external affix. Certain rules apply only to bare stems and not to words with affixes. A verb formed by reanalyzing adjacent verbs as a single morphological word is accessible to these rules if its head is a stem; non-head roots in the reanalyzed verb are inaccessible to all morphological rules, as predicted.