Deverbal nominals in Xhosa
[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The relationship between deverbative noun classification and their effect on the semanticmeaning of the derived deverbal nominal has been the focus of many studies in linguistics,with special reference to African languages in recent years. The study maintains that thedescriptive analysis of deverbal nominals in African languages does not fully interrogate thepredicate argument structures of the verbs that host these deverbal nominals. This thesis is aninvestigation of how the syntactic properties of verbs from which deverbal nouns are derivedare invoked in explaining the argument structure and event structure properties of deverbalnouns, particularly in Xhosa. The analysis presented here is situated in terms of a lexicalsemantic representation drawing on Pustejovsky (1996) and Busa (1996), which aims tocapture linguistically relevant components of meaning.Chapter 1 presents the purpose and aims of the study, and states the theoretical paradigm onwhich this study is couched, namely Pustejovsky's (1996) generative lexicon theory as well asthe methodology for conducting the research.Chapter 2 contains a literature review on deverbal nominals in African languages. Thischapter explores the general definitions of concepts, the descriptive nature of deverbalnominals from various African languages, noun classification and the morphology of Africannouns.Chapter 3 reports on an examination of the generative lexicon theory. This theory containsmultiple levels of representation for different types of lexical information required, namelythe argument structure, the event structure, the qualia structure and the lexical inherentstructure. For the purposes of this study, the first three levels of representation were used foranalysis.Chapter 4 contains the systematic classification of deverbal nominals that are derived fromvarious semantic verb classes and are considered under their derivation from intransitive,transitive and di-transitive verbs, respectively. The first lexical schematic representation foreach verb class gives a classification of various deverbal noun classes 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11 and14 in instances where the noun class applies. The second schematic representation details howthese various verb classes are classified/categorised in terms of their semantic type. There are various noun class nominalisations for each verb class, which serve as a representative foreach group of the various verb classes.Chapter 5 provides a detailed analysis of various deverbal nouns derived from different verbclasses utilising the generative lexicon theory as a source of reference, particularly the firstthree levels of representation. The compositionality and the semanticality of derived nominalswithin the predicate argument structures are demonstrated.Chapter 6 summarises the findings of all previous chapters in this study.
[发布日期] [发布机构] Stellenbosch University
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