The morphological, semantic and syntactic significance of the Northern Sotho applied suffix

Abstract

The Northern Sotho verbal extensions have in most of the linguistic literature been treated together in a cursory manner rather than as individual suffixes. As a result these extensions in general, and the applied suffix in particular, were not examined extensively. Those scholars (Ziervoge, 1969; Mokgokong, 1975; Lombard, 1985, to mention but a few) who treated verbal extensions in Northern Sotho seem to have left many aspects of the applied suffix unexamined. This paper aims to explore the applied verbal suffix in Northern Sotho more comprehensively, with respect to the morphological, syntactic and semantic significance introduced by this suffix -el-. One of the most important effects that the applied suffix has is that it adds an extra internal argument to the verb. The paper will focus on the interpretation of the different arguments introduced by the applied suffix. This study assumes the general framework of the theory of Government Binding (GB) as explicated in Chomsky (1981), Haegeman (1994) andRapport and Levin (1988).