Semantically Ambiguous: An Overview of Some Akan and Dangme Riddles

Riddles, like folktales are considered an important aspect of speech games that promote critical thinking. Due to the influx of foreign games, local riddles have recently lost their values. But as an important aspect of Akan and Dangme cultures, riddles are included in school curricula, especially at the higher learning
institutions, to create awareness of their socio-cultural importance in the society and to the youth. The importance of riddles and brain teasers cannot be overemphasized. Policy makers are keenly interested in promoting the use of riddles as a means of empowering the Ghanaian youth with the capacity to resolve
the growing challenges of our economy. This paper seeks to address some of the teething problems associated with some of the popular Akan and Dangme riddles. Using aspects of the ethnography of communication theory (Gumperz, 1972) and (Saville-Troike 2003), selected riddles from the two languages, collected from communities were analyzed descriptively by means of feature/componential method. The findings are that, the meanings and/or ideas they express are not certain due to the sameness of features between the items with which the riddles are framed and other items. The paper has thus added to literature in the discipline of semantics.

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©2019 Jonathan Edward Tetteh Kuwornu-Adjaottor, George Appiah, Melvin Nartey
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