Dagbani is a Gur language spoken by approximately five hundred thousand people (Dagbamba/Dagombas) in Northern Ghana. With regard to morphological typology, Dagbani can be described as agglutinative with some degree of fusion: certain combinations of morphemes may be obscured by phonological and morphophonological rules. Most affixes in the language occur as suffixes, with a few prefixes to verbs. Compounding of verbal or nominal roots is common; typically, the output will be a noun. Syntactically, Dagbani is strictly AVO, SV; however frontshifting of objects or other non-verbal elements is very common.

As far as the status of the word is concerned, the language displays a number of interesting features. These include the structure of possible minimal words (§ 1.5), the role of noun–adjective constructions which surface as morphological compounds (§ 2.1), and adjectival derivations that illustrate the phenomenon of ‘bound words’ (§ 2.2). Dagbani also has a number of proclitic and enclitic elements, which is interesting, since most languages that are predominantly suffixing tend not to have proclitics (see Aikhenvald in chapter 2).

The following sections describe how Dagbani words can be characterised with respect to their relationship to phonology, morphology and syntax/ semantics.

Phonological word

As pointed out in chapter 1, the distinction between grammatical and phonological word is often difficult to make. Among the criteria for the definition of a phonological word, some of the following have been suggested, although there are problematic cases:

• boundaries defined by stress or tone;

• pauses (e.g. in dictation);

• phonological rules specifically applying to a word.