The noun phrase of Tonga and Lenje: A contrastive study
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Date
2012-01-11
Authors
Chitebeta, Avinat Mbwela
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Abstract
This study, "The noun phrase of Tonga and Lenje: a contrastive study,"
carried out a contrastive investigation of the noun phrase in Tonga and Lenje. These belong to a group of languages called Bantu Botatwe by J. Torrend because of their affinity. The term Bantu Botatwe, meaning 'three people' was chosen on account of the fact that in these languages 'three people' is expressed as Bantu Botatwe. While the affinity of the Tonga, the Lenje and, the other Bantu Botatwe ethnic group is generally accepted, no systematic contrastive grammatical study of their languages has been carried out. The purpose of this study was to make a contribution to resolve this deficit by conducting a contrastive investigation of the noun phrase in Tonga and Lenje.
The study specifically focused on the syntax and morphosyntax of the noun phrase. The syntactic analysis was carried out using the Government-Binding* (GB) framework.
Introspection was used as the main source of data collection for Tonga. However, additional data on Tonga were collected from other Tonga speakers and published materials. The researcher translated the data from Tonga into English. For Lenje, One native speaker of Lenje was used and translated the data into Lenje, which was checked by two other native speakers of Lenje, who have knowledge of Tonga and English. During the investigation, a number of PS rules were identified which describe the major types of NPs in both Tonga and Lenje. The researcher hopes that this study will contribute to the existing linguistic studies. The study will be helpful at both secondary and college levels.
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Keywords
Language and Languages--Study and Teaching--Zambia , linguistics--Tonga--Zambia