Word order The canonical word order of Dagaare is SVO (subject-verb-object). This can be seen in the following examples showing an intransitive clause, a transitive clause including an adverb and a ditransitive clause.
Verb phrase The VP in Dagaare consists of a preverbal particle encoding tense, the predicate, and a postverbal particle with a function yet to be fully investigated.
Preverbal particles Daagare marks past and future tenses by the use of preverbal particles. Present tense is not marked or lexicalized in this language. These preverbal particles function like auxiliary verbs in Indo-European languages lexicalizing tense and aspectual features. Contrary to Indo-European languages like English, French and Norwegian, Dagaare exhibits the lexicalization of a habitual marker. While in the Indo-European languages this habitual marker is basically an adverb, in Dagaare it is realized as the preverbal particle
mang. This preverbal particle can only occur after the subject, thus it is not an adverb, since adverbs are more flexible in the positions they can potentially occur in within the clause.
Major particles These preverbal particles are difficult to classify as temporal, aspectual, modal and polar, since the relationship between polarity and tense in the
Mabia languages is very tight. This means that a particular preverbal particle can express a positive or negative action in the past
(da) or a positive or negative action in the future
(na). The
na particle for instance does not only mark tense, but also positivity of an action. Its counterpart
kong is not simply the negation of an action, but also indicating the tense of this action.
Main verb The main verb in Dagaare consists of a verb stem and a suffix. This suffix encodes perfective or imperfective aspect. In this system, the speaker considers an action as either completed or not yet completed, irrespective of whether the action happens in the present or past tense. There is the verbal suffix form
-ng in Dagaare, whose function is to affirm or emphasize the verbal action. This affix is in complementary distribution with the postverbal particle
la, also shown in the subsection on this postverbal particle. Most verb roots in Dagaare are monosyllabic and combine with inflectional affixes. As already mentioned, the main inflectional affixes in Dagaare express aspect. There are then three distinct inflectional affix forms, one imperfective or progressive affix
(-ro) and two perfective or completive affixes
(-∅, -e). Imperative forms are homophonous with the perfective transitive forms. In some cases, the Q-element is followed not only by the particle
lá, but additionally by the complementizer
kà. This might indicate that the Q-element occupies the specifier position and the complementizer appears in the head position of the CP. The particle
lá occurs in between both elements and might mark focus, in this case verbal focus. Lastly, multiple questions are highly marked in Dagaare. In these cases, one Q-element occurs ex situ and the other one(s) in situ.
In situ Examples for a question that do not exhibit the question word ex situ are the so-called
bee questions, which are known as yes-/no- questions in languages like English. These questions only require a yes- or no-answer instead of a more complex and informative answer.
Bee is here the particular question marker, which has to appear obligatorily as the final element of the clause. These questions can express contrastive focus. Besides this type of question, there are cases, in which the question word can also appear in situ. These questions might correspond to echo questions.
Long distance extraction In Dagaare the question word can cross a clause-boundary, which gives rise to long distance extraction. The following examples illustrates the potential positions within the clause, in which the question word can occur. Note that only in the second example below a focus marker occurs, which varies from la to na. Moreover, the two complementizers indicate the clause boundary across which the question word has been moved. ==References==