Abstract
Setswana is an agglutinative language with a rich verbal morphology, allowing for an elaborate system of verbal inflection. Until now, research on Setswana verbal morphology has largely been based on qualitative methods. This paper discusses the frequency of use and the sequencing of Setswana verbal suffixes, based on statistics extracted from the 67,284 orthographic-unit, annotated NCHLT Setswana corpus which includes 9,146 verbs. On this quantitative basis, the relationship between productivity/frequency and the position/slot of Setswana verbal suffixes is investigated. In addition, the relationship between the frequency and position of these same Setswana verbal suffixes and their inflectional or derivational nature is also considered. The data is subsequently used to evaluate and comment on existing descriptive grammars of Setswana.
Highlights
Introduction and theoretical backgroundSetswana is a Bantu language that appears in the South-Eastern zone of Guthrie’s (1971) zonal topogram
As the tokenisation of Setswana verbs is influenced by the disjunctive orthography of the verbal prefixes, it is necessary to briefly elaborate on this process and how it is handled in the two abovementioned projects
The results of the corpus analysis upon which this article is based show that proximity to the root and productivity are found to be in opposition for Setswana verbal suffixes
Summary
Setswana is a Bantu language that appears in the South-Eastern zone of Guthrie’s (1971) zonal topogram. Setswana is generally referred to as an agglutinative language and, like the other languages in the SothoTswana group, it has a rich verbal morphology allowing for the stringing together of several morphemes These languages are characterised by a disjunctive orthography affecting mainly verbs; a single linguistic word (verb) may be represented by a number of orthographically separate units (Krüger 2006:12-28, Kosch 2006:3). Of more importance for this article is the position of Kosch (2006, 2007) who discusses the inflectional and derivational morphology of the Sotho languages, focusing mainly on Northern Sotho She indicates several criteria for the distinction between inflectional and derivational morphemes and stresses the fact that this distinction should be treated as language-specific and not as a discreet distinction, i.e. she proposes a sliding scale between derivation and inflection. She highlights the relationship between the productivity of a suffix and its position relative to the root
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