Lecture | This Time for Africa! Series
Exploring The Semantics of ‘OPENING’ Events in Asante Twi
- Date
- Friday 16 October 2026
- Time
- Series
- This Time for Africa! series
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.30
Abstract
This study examines how speakers of Asante Twi conceptualize and linguistically encode opening events by analysing the semantics of relevant verbs and their syntactic behaviour. Opening events, a subcategory of separation events, are characterized by minimal destruction of the affected object. They are typically reversible and thus contrast with cutting and breaking events, which involve considerable material damage and generally result in non-reversible alterations to the structural integrity of the object. Drawing on data elicited through video-stimulus tasks and event narrations, I demonstrate that Asante Twi employs two generic verbs to describe different types of opening: bùè ‘to open’ and bàè ‘to open wide; to spread out’. Both verbs describe prototypical openings—commonly those performed with the hands—and occur with a range of nominal referents, including books, boxes, cloths, and saucepans. In addition, they encode the opening of body parts composed of two articulating segments, such as the mouth, eyes, legs, and hands. The findings illustrate that the conceptualization and categorization of separation events are not universal but exhibit cross-linguistic and cultural variation.