A syntactic analysis of the Book of Proverbs in Ga

Proverbs are wise sayings that normally occur in speech and writings of language users to show the richness of the language. Proverbs that normally advise readers or hearers may have allegorical truth behind their literary appearances. This article employs the principles and parameters framework and parallelism to focus on the linguistic analysis of the Book of Proverbs. The aim is to examine the patterns of parallelism in the Book of Proverbs in Ga and to find out the grammatical structures and sentence types used in the Book of Proverbs in the Ga Bible. The data elicited were in Ga, a Kwa language of the Niger-Congo phylum, from the Book of Proverbs in the Ga Bible. The patterns of the proverbs were further analysed into seven structures such as descriptive, single statement, statement with explanation, comparison, opposite parallel among others. In terms of pattern, the if…. then statements were more dominant in the data corpus. The article reveals that compound sentences were dominant in the Book of Proverbs and from the function point declarative sentences were in the majority.