| Summary: | This paper provides a constructionist account of Akan constructions of the form
àhòɔ̀déń ‘strength’ and àsòɔdéń ‘disobedience’ which had been previously analysed as compounds. Through the analysis of previously cited examples in the relevant literature and additional examples collected purposively from written sources, is shown that the constructions exhibit a constellation of formal and semantic/pragmatic properties that get masked in a straightforward compounding analysis. Also posited is a constructional idiom whose formal structure is motivated by atypical syntactic construction (predicate adjective construction) and a prefixation schema, through the process of template
unification. Thus, some of the properties of this construction are motivated by already existing constructions, even though their properties may not be entirely predictable from those other constructions, confirming that language is a network. It is shown that the construction has limited productivity because of some stringent restrictions on possible constituents. Finally, a broad semantic classification of the constructions is provided and
some properties of the major classes discussed.
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