ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the properties of demonstratives in Dagbani, a Southwestern Oti-Volta language of the Central Gur (Mabia) family spoken mainly in Northern Ghana. The work focuses on the morphological properties, internal structure, distributional properties, semantics and pragmatics of the Dagbani demonstratives, an area of the language that has remained largely uninvestigated. The study of demonstratives has received some appreciable level of attention in the linguistics literature: Lakoff (1974), Bhat (2013), Diessel (2013a, 2013b) and Rybarczyk (2015), just to mention a few. Within the Gur phylum, a known piece of work that has attempted a systematic formal account of the structure of demonstratives is Sulemana (2012) who gives an analysis of demonstratives in Buli couched within the theoretical tenets of generative syntax.
