African Languages
Permanent URI for this community
Browse
Browsing African Languages by Subject "Diachronic development -- Sesotho linguistics"
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open 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 Nyefolo𝑬𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒉 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as well as other contemporary Sesotho linguists, have written on various aspects of the Sesotho language, especially in unpublished research theses and dissertations.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. ___________________________________________________________________