Browsing by Author "Tshikota, Shumani Leonard"

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    The noun and the dictionary in Tshivenda
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2001-03) Tshikota, Shumani Leonard; Du Plessis, J. A.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of African Languages.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The lemmatisation of nouns in African and Non-African language dictionaries is investigated with a view to account for the development of a theoretical framework of how nouns could be lemmatised in a Tshivenda monolingual dictionary. Within the African language dictionaries two traditions exist for lemmatisation of nouns: the stem or root system and the word system. Dictionaries belonging to the Nguni languages enter nouns according to the letter of the root or stem and this has been followed because of the presence of a preprefix in these langauges. Languages like Venda, Tsonga and Sotho usually enter nouns in the dictionary under the first letter of the prefix if present. In African languages the morphological and syntactic category noun is exactly the same. With syntax and morphology the category noun is presented by the root or stem of the noun with prefixes added as inherent semantic and grammatical features of such nouns. So, the exact entry in a dictionary has to be considered form the view point of the syntactic and morphological category only. Taking these considerations into account a case can be made for the treatment of nouns in dictionaries. In a Tshivenda monolingual dictionary nouns are entered as head of the noun phrases (NPs); thus indicating the syntactic operation of the noun outside the context of a sentence. In other instances the syntactic operations are indicated within the context of a sentence and this information is indicated within a dictionary implicitly or covertly by means of illustrative examples. Nouns in these dictionaries may appear with two and or more than two arguments. Semantically, the noun Halwa in a Tshivenda monolingual dictionary may have two arguments: firstly it may mean "an intoxicating drink" and secondly it may refer to "a container for holding beer". Thus the noun in African language dictionaries, Tshivenda in particular, could be represented syntactically morphologically and semantically.