Augustina’s talk on Anaphoricity Marking in Akan

I revisit the interpretation of the so-called definite determiner, nò in Akan. I contend that contrary to previous analyses, nò is not a definite determiner of type <<e,t>e>. Rather, I claim it is as a partial identity function which triggers an anaphoric presupposition. The main advantage of the present theory is that it presents a uniform semantics of the use of nò in examples (1a) and (1b). In example (1a) nò follows an NP, I will refer to this as the nominal nò.̀ In (1b) it is at the end of a wh-question, and this will be referred to as the clausal nò.

1.    Me-tɔ-ɔ         ataadeɛ    ne      mpaboa bi.         Mpaboa nò yɛ   fɛ.

1SG-buy-PST dress     CONJ shoe      INDEF shoe       nò COP nice

‘I bought a shoe. The shoe was nice.’

2.    Hena na  ɔ-ba-a               ha  nò.
Who foc. 3sg-come-pst here nò

`What came here?’

The nominal and clausal nò are assumed to be underlyingly the same morpheme by Amfo (2006), and Arkoh & Mathewson (2013), a.o.  This talk will focus on the nominal nò. I show that as an anaphoric expression, the antecedent of the nò phrase should only be weakly familiar, (Roberts 2003). In other words, it does not necessarily require a linguistic antecedent. The only requirement is that the descriptive content of the antecedent is compatible with the descriptive content of the anaphoric expression.