African Languages

Permanent URI for this community

http://hdl.handle.net/11660/114

Browse

Browsing African Languages by Author "Nhlapo, Moselane Andrew"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Historical perspectives on the development of Sesotho linguistics with reference to syntactic categories
    (University of the Free State, 2021) Nhlapo, Moselane Andrew; Malete, Elias Nyefolo
    𝑬𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒉 Numerous scholars, including missionaries of various denominations of the past as well as other contemporary Sesotho linguists, have written on various aspects of the Sesotho language, especially in unpublished research theses and dissertations. However, there is no publication, which formerly traces the diachronic development of Sesotho linguistics, and in particular, the identification and classification of Sesotho syntactic categories within a particular linguistic developmental period. This research study traces the historical development of Sesotho syntactic categories. It also traces over time how various linguists have identified, described, and analyzed Sesotho syntactic categories, looking at the prominent characteristics of various linguistic periods, namely the pre-literacy period (1659-1800), historical-comparative period (1800-1826), missionary period (1826-1927), structural/functional period (1927-1975) and modern/Chomskyan period (1975 to date). It has been observed that during the pre-literary period, Sesotho was a spoken language and the transmission of information, history, and involvement within the Basotho was predominantly through the oral practice and performance rather thano n written texts. The Basotho people used oral traditions such as folklore, proverbs, riddles, songs, and stories to pass information from one generation to another. The missionaries introduced Sesotho orthography and Sesotho grammar where syntactic categories such as nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections were identified; where grammatical concepts such as case in Sesotho and its various types were also identified, the concept that was later disputed by Doke and Mofokeng. In the structural period, Doke, van Wyk, and Ziervogel identified more syntactic categories besides nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and conjunctions. They added copulatives, interjections, and relatives. The Chomskyan period broadly classified Sesotho syntactic categories; it provides a full description and analysis of sentences, phrases, and words. It identified five broad syntactic categories, namely i) sentences as parts of speech, ii) Phrases as grammatical categories, iii) Lexical categories as syntactic categories (this category consists of nouns, verbs, copulatives, deficient verbs, adverbs, adjectives, relatives, conjunctions, prepositions, quantifiers, and enumerative), iv) Inflectional categories (agreement of inflection, tense, mood, aspects, and negatives) and v) Empty categories such as pronouns, null subject, and the infinitive. Finally, this study presents an observation that the analysis of grammatical phenomena at different times in the history of African Languages, were patterned and classified according to European classical languages and prominent characteristics of a particular linguistic period, despite their unique grammatical structures, and that with the arrival of the modern linguistic approaches (Generative Transformational Grammar), which filtered through at a later stage in the historical development of African languages, recognized the uniqueness of syntactic categories of African Languages, bringing them back into their spaces of history and securing their lost identity. ___________________________________________________________________
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    The sequence of derivational and inflectional morphemes in selected Sesotho word categories
    (University of the Free State, 2015-11-25) Nhlapo, Moselane Andrew; Malete, E. N.
    English: This study examines the sequence of Sesotho derivational and inflectional morphemes in open class word categories (verbs and deverbative nouns). It examines how these morphemes are ordered and based on Greenberg’s universal clause, which states that ‘if both the derivation and inflection follow the root, or they both precede the root, the derivation is always between the root and the inflection’ (Greenberg 1963:93). This statement has been tested in Sesotho word categories such as verb phrases and deverbative noun phrases. A brief description, classification, linear and hierarchical arrangement of Sesotho grammatical morphemes have been given in terms of the XBar theory and Beard (1995)’s, Lexeme-Based – Morphology as a background theory to contextualise the analysis of the sequence of Sesotho lexical morphemes. Sample word categories were chosen from Sesotho noun class list, and a range of Sesotho word categories were selected from the list and analysed to determine the sequence and various combinations of derivational and inflectional morphemes. It has been observed that inflectional morphemes in verbs are always amid the root and the closing vowel known as the verbal end. Secondly, it has been observed that when inflectional morphemes appear with derivational morphemes in the formation of a new word category, the derivational morphemes, in this case noun prefixes, always appear at the beginning of the word as in (Mosebeletsi [Worker]), and also appear at the end of the word as in this example (Tshwarelo [Forgiveness]). This study argued that Sesotho as one of the agglutinative languages, employs noun class prefixes as nominal derivational morphemes, which appear at the beginning of the noun and it also employs locative suffixes [-eng] to form locative nouns which function as adverbs. The suffix [-eng] therefore also functions as derivational morpheme but in this case it appears at the end of the noun locatives. This study therefore concludes that Sesotho does not conform to Greenberg’s (1963) universal statement.