Descriptive nominal modifiers in Setswana

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:The study focused on three descriptive nominal modifiers which specify the attributes ofnouns, i.e. the morphological adjective, the relative clause and the descriptive possessive.The morphological adjective appears in an adjectival phrase, which has to consist of adeterminer and an adjective. The adjective must have agreement with the head noun inan NP. The adjective root may appear with nominal suffixes such as -ana and -gadi, it canbe reduplicated, it may be transposed to other categories and it may even becompounded. The AP may also occur in predicative position as well as in comparativeclauses.The relative clause may have the same semantic properties as the adjective. The relativeclause in Setswana consists of a determiner in the position of the complementizer followedby an lP. Such an lP may have a copulative or non-copulative verb. Attention in this studyhas focused on the nominal relative, which appears as a complement of a copulative verb.These nominal relative stems have been divided into two sections, i.e. a section in whichthe nominal relative stems may not appear in a descriptive possessive construction and asecond section where these stems may also appear as a complement of the possessive[a]. The semantic features of these nominal relative stems have been isolated and it isclear that they show a wide variety of semantic features. This type of relative clauserepresents the most prolific category, which specifies the attributes of nouns.The third category, which displays the semantic feature of an attribute of a noun, is thedescriptive possessive construction. The syntactic and semantic structure of this type ofphrase has been investigated. A wide variety of complements of the possessive [a] havebeen isolated in Setswana and some semantic features have received specific attention,i.e. group nouns and partitives.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University