The structure of the Dagbani conditional clause

structure of the Dagbani conditional clause

Abstract

The expression of conditional clauses remains unexplored in most African languages including Dagbani. In this paper, I provide an account of the structure of the conditional clause of Dagbani, a Mabia language spoken in Northern Ghana. I show that there are two ways of expressing conditionality in Dagbani including the use of an independent syntactic element yi and the yi-less conditional clause which does not require the overt yi conditional marker. Regarding the syntax of this conditional particle, I demonstrate that it occurs in the protasis and can either precede or follow the adoposis. The yi-less conditional is, however, introduced by lan/lahi ‘again’, which occurs in the dependent clause and the independent clause is preceded by the linker ka ‘and’.  It is further demonstrated that Dagbani conditionality exhibits both reality and unreality conditional clauses, and that the two have distinct syntactic characterizations. The particle di together with naan is identified as the counterfactual markers in the language, which I analyze as discontinuous morphemes, which combine with the conditionality particle yi in coding unreality conditionals. The data used in this work are drawn from two main sources: data taken from Dagbani literary works and some constructed based on my native speaker introspection as a native speaker of Dagbani.