The internal Structures of Simplex and Complex nominals in Tagbana

Abstract

Abstract: The paper investigates complex nominal expressions in Tagbana a language spoken in the central-north part of Côte d´Ivoire. Complex nominal or compounds are the relation between two lexical categories, producing another by an implicit relationship between the constituents, Chappell & McGregor (1989) and Guevara & Scalise (2009) and it has been highly attentive in the linguistics literatures but none of them exist on Tagbana. Three kinds of complex nouns are explored in this paper: complex nouns consisting of two or more nominal roots (n +n); compounds consisting of a nominal and a verbal root (n + v) and the third kind consisting of a nominal and an adjectival root (n + a). The question arises as to the nature of the hierarchy of the structure of these complex constituents. It is shown that the rightmost element of a compound, or the final one in case there is more than two, is always the head of the compound and the entire complex noun acquires the class of the last element. If, however, the second element is an adjective, which does not have a class by itself, in this case, the complex noun acquires the class of the leftmost element. I propose an account of how morphological structures interact in these kinds of constructions and I look at the extent to which distributed morphology can account for these complex nominal constructions in Tagbana. Keywords: Complex nominals, Tagbana, Morphology, Distributed Morphology