Giving Reference to the Pronominal ‘e’ in Ga.

Abstract

The paper investigates the third person singular pronoun anaphor e in Ga, a Kwa Language. The pronominal e which is prefixed may be glossed as ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it’. This pronominal which is prefixed refers to a definite third person discourse entity. It has no gender distinctions and it has also no animate distinctions. In Ga the pronominal e is attached to the verbs when in subjective position. When the pronominal is prefixed to the noun it marks possessive. However there are certain contexts in which the interpretation of the pronominal can be ‘he’ only or ‘she’ only and  other instances cannot be either of them  The aim  is to find how the singular pronoun anaphor  could be disambiguated  in discourse especially where giving the referent to the anaphor is not simple. The paper applies the Centering Theory to analyse utterances in which this pronoun occurs and also the Givenness Hierarchy was considered in some cases where the referent resolution process involves a choice between two candidate referents. Data used was elicited by the researchers after having several chats with other natives of Ga. It came to light that in addition to the theories applied, the sociocultural norms and the lexical verb give clues in resolution of the third person singular pronoun.

Keywords: pronominal, anaphor, centering theory, disambiguate, referent