Kusaal

Kusaal is a Mabia language and has 500 000 speakers. It is spoken in Ghana, Togo and Burkina Faso. Kusaal has two dialects, Agole and Toende. Agole is spoken in the east of Ghana and Togo, whereas Toende is spoken across the border of the north of Ghana to the south of Burkina Faso. There are approximately 350 000 speakers of Agole and 87 000 speakers of Toende.

Linguistic classification

• Niger-Congo
  • Atlantic-Congo
    • Mabia
      • Mabia Central
        • Mabia Kusaal
          • Kusaal

Tone system

Kusaal has three level tones and a downstepped high tone.

Lexical Function

Grammatical Function

In Kusaal, the perfective and future negations are expressed by tone marking on the preverbal particles. The particles pʊ/ku both are negative future morphemes. If these particles are expressed by a low tone, they are translated as will not, while if they are expressed by a high tone, they are translated as did not.

Noun Class System

Classes	Suffixes	Examples	Gloss
a. 1/2	-a/-ba	púà/púàbà	person/persons
	-t,-d/-b	níd/nídíb	person/persons
b. 1/2	∅/nam(a)	mà/mànàm(à)	mother/mothers
	-b(a)/-nam(a)	yààb(à)/yàànàm/yàànàmà	ancestor/ancestors
3/4	-g/-s	bííg/bíís	child/children
	- ŋ/-mis	gúŋ/gúmís	kapok tree/kapok trees
5/6	-g/-d	mɔ̟̀ɔ̟̀g/mɔ̟̀ɔ̟̀d	grass/grasses
a. 7/8	-r(i)/-a	yír,yírí/yá	house/houses
b. 7/8	-∅/-a	sɛ´ɛ´m/sɛ´ɛ´má	porcupine/porcupines
9/10	-f(o)/-gi,-di	wááf(ò)/wíígì	snake/snakes
11	-m	kú'òm	Water

Pronominal System¹

Personal Pronouns/Possessive Pronouns

In Kusaal, the personal pronouns are homonymous with the possessive pronouns. The only difference between both kinds of pronouns is that personal pronouns can occur in subject and object positions, while possessive pronouns are restricted to genitive positions meaning that they obligatorily immediately precede the nominal element they modify.² The table below illustrates the paradigm for both kinds of pronouns.¹

Person	Subject / Possessor		Object		Emphatic
Number	SG	PL	SG	PL	SG	PL
1st	m	ti	-m	-ti	man/man	tinam
2nd	fʋ	ya	-if	-ya	fʋn	yanam
3rd [+human]	o	ba	o	ba	on	banam
3rd [-human]	di/li	ba	li	ba	din	ban

Emphatic Pronouns

Emphatic pronouns are used in order to emphasize a certain role, meaning that they pragmatically are exclusive in the discourse.

Reciprocal Pronouns

Similarly to Dagbani and Gurene, the reciprocal pronoun in Kusaal is taaba, which means each other or one another.

Reflexive Pronouns

Reflexive pronouns are formed by the form of the personal pronouns and the reflexive morphem mɛŋ. In contrast to Gurene, in Kusaal the reflexive pronouns do not inflect for number.¹

Personal Pronoun	Suffix	Singular	Reflexive Pronoun	Plural	Reflexive Pronoun
1st	-mɛŋ	M	m mɛŋ	ti	ti mɛŋ
2nd	-mɛŋ	fu	fu mɛŋ	ya	ya mɛŋ
3rd [+human]	-mɛŋ	o	o mɛŋ	ba	ba mɛŋ
3rd [-human]	-mɛŋ	di	di mɛŋ	di	di mɛŋ

Relative Pronouns

Relative clauses in Kusaal can be headed either externally or internally, meaning that the head of the relative clause either is outside or inside the relative clause.³⁴ There are two relative pronouns in Kusaal, kane and onɛ. While the former can refer to human and non-human entities and has a plural form bane, the latter can only refer to human entities and does not have a plural form.¹ the contrast between these relative pronouns is shown in (6a) and (6b).

Demonstrative Pronoun

There are four demonstrative pronouns in Kusaal, which make a distinction in terms of number and distance. Thus, there is a distinction between proximate and distal demonstrative pronouns, whereby nwa and nɛ’ɛŋa/nɛ are used in singular for proximate elements, while bamma and 'banna'' are used in plural and refer to distal elements.¹

Demonstrative Pronoun	Gloss
nwa	this/that
nɛ’ɛŋa/nɛ	this/that
bamma	these/those
banna	these/those

Interrogative Pronoun

Interrogative pronouns in Kusaal can occur either clause-initially or they can stand in situ. The table below provides an overview of the interrogative pronouns in Kusaal, whereby kanɛ and banɛ can be used for human and non-human entities.²

	Singular	Gloss	Plural	Gloss
Human	anɔ’ɔnɛ	who	anɔ’ɔnama	which people
	kanɛ	which one	banɛ	which ones
Non-human	din(ɛ)/ lin(e)	which one
	yaanɛ	where
	dakanɛ	which day/ when
	bɔ’	what	bɔnama	what things

Word Order

Kusaal has a strict SVO word order, but clefting is common. The following examples show the word order for an intransitive, a transitive and a ditransitive clause with either an adverbial or with an adjunct.

Verb System

The VP in Kusaal consists of preverbal particles encoding tense, aspect, mood and polarity, and the main verb.

Preverbal Particles

The table below provides an overview of the most common preverbal particles.²

Temporal	Particle	Gloss	Translation
	pa/paa	HOD.PST	earlier today
	sa/saa	HEST.PST	only yesterday
	da/daa	DIST.PST	two or more days ago
Modality	yan		as usual
	lɛn		again
	pʊn		already
	ɛ̃ɛti		often
	pa’ati		may be
	yaa	COND	if/when
	nan		still
	sid		actually
	na	FUT	will
	saa + na	FUT.CRAS	only tomorrow
	yé	ING	going to
Polarity	pʊ̀	NEG	not
	kʊ́	NEG.FUT	will not
	dá	NEG.IMP	don't

Main Verb

Verbs in Kusaal do not inflect for number, but for aspect. The aspectual system is split into the perfective form and the imperfective form. The perfective is marked by the suffix -ya, whereas the imperfective is marked by the suffix -t/-d. For instance, the verb di ('eat') in the perfective form is diya ('has eaten'), while in the imperfective it is dit ('eats'). In the progressive form on the other hand, it is ditnɛ, thus the imperfective form of di with the additional suffix -nɛ as a marker indicating the progressive.² The examples below show the different aspectual marking of the verb in Kusaal, but note that the habitual marker in the glosses corresponds to the imperfective marking on the verb.

Negation

In general, negation in Kusaal is expressed by a negator that precedes the negated element like the verb or nominal. There exist also verb forms that are inherently polar to each other like mi' ('know') and zi' ('not know').

Nominal negation

In order to negotiate a nominal predicate, the generic nominal negator ka' is placed immediately before the predicate. This form is the polar equivalent to the copula ã ('to be') and also reflects the negative form of bɛ ('be at') and mɔr ('to have'). Note that the abbreviation SFE in the glosses stands for sentence final element.

Negation of a declarative

In contrast to the nominal negator ka', there also exists a generic verbal negator pʊ that is mainly used for ditransitives in the present and past tense, but importantly not for future tense and imperatives. The verbal negator functions like a preverbal particle in that it immediately precedes the verb, as in (17a). In cases in which there are other preverbal particles as well, the verbal negator still immediately precedes the verb and thus follows other preverbal particles, like in (17b).

If a delacrative is negated in the perfective form, the verbal negator again immediately precedes the verb, but as a result the verb loses its perfective marker -ya, whereas the final vowel is lengthened.

Declaratives in the imperfective form, either habitual or progressive, are negated in the same way, but the verb does not lose its imperfective marker.

Negation involving future

The negator that is used in order to negate a clause in the future tense is kʊ. It reflects the negative meaning as well as the future reading. The preverbal particles for negation and future tense are thus in complementary distribution.

Negation of an imperative

In order to negate an imperative, there is an additional preverbal particle da that is only used in imperatives. In contrast to the verbal negator that changes the verb form like in the perfective, the negator for imperatives does not change the form of the verb.

Question Formation

Main Question Words

The table below offers an overview of the most common question words in Kusaal.²

Question Word	Gloss
yáanɛ̀	where
kānɛ̀/līnɛ̀	which
bɔ	what
wálà	how
àlà	how much/many
ànɔ̄’ɔnɛ̀	who
dàakānɛ̀	which day
sáŋkānɛ̀	what time

Ex situ

In general, questions in Kusaal strictly obey the word order SVO, whereby the subject is replaced by a question word, as in the examples below. In ex situ questions, the focus marker kā obligatorily immediately follows the question word.

In situ

Regular interrogative questions exhibit the question word in situ as the last element of the clause and also strictly obey the word order SVO, as shown below. These questions correspond to echo-questions.

Embedded

In embedded contexts, the question word can occupy several distinct positions. In (32a), it occurs in situ in the subordinated clause, whereas it occurs ex situ in the subordinated clause in (32b), where is appears between the complementizer introducing the embedded clause and the focus marker ka. In (32c) the question word occurs ex situ in the matrix clause, showing that long distance extraction is possible.

Multiple Questions

In Kusaal, a question can consist of more than one question word, whereby one question word occurs ex situ and the other one in situ as in (33a). As shown in (33b), only one question word can occupy the clause-initial position, such that more than one question word at the beginning of the clause leads to ungrammaticality. The answer to the multiple question given in (33c) shows morphological focus marking on the subject, which is only possible in multiple questions.