Grammar
Ewe is a subject–verb–object language. The possessive precedes the head noun. Adjectives, numerals, demonstratives and relative clauses follow the head noun. Ewe also has postpositions rather than prepositions.
Ewe is well known as a language having logophoric pronouns. Such pronouns are used to refer to the source of a reported statement or thought in indirect discourse, and can disambiguate sentences that are ambiguous in most other languages. The following examples illustrate:
- Kofi be e-dzo 'Kofi said he left' (he ≠ Kofi)
- Kofi be yè-dzo 'Kofi said he left' (he = Kofi)
In the second sentence, yè is the logophoric pronoun.
Ewe also has a rich system of serial verb constructions.
Read more about this topic: Ewe Language
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)