Analysis of a Sesotho verb phrase

Abstract

This qualitative study employs the mixture of the X-bar and RTM theories to analyse a Sesotho VP. The previous academics concentrated on different linguistic features and dimensions, in various languages. Their studies are also limited to the syntactic rule representation of a VP. This study has discovered that the concept of VP is ambiguous to Sesotho learners, teachers, and linguists studying Sesotho language. The study also discovers that the Sesotho VP’s unclear structure, which consists of multiple components, is a cause of this ambiguity. This study, therefore, aims to uncover the Sesotho VP syntactic structure, the constituents it carries, its grammatical functions, as well as the resolutions to its syntactic ambiguity in sentences. The findings of this study disclosed various Sesotho VP syntactic structures, such as V, V + AdvP + QualP, V + NP, V + PP, V + AdvP + AdvP, V + NP + QualP + QualP + AdvP, and V + AdvP. The grammatical functions of the Sesotho VP were revealed as; functioning as the predicate of the sentence, as the complement of a VP, and as the complement of the qualificative, which includes the AdjQual, RelQual, InterQual, as well as POSSQual. Furthermore, disambiguation mechanisms such as the principle of modification, the use of punctuationformal signal), and the change of word order principles, were identified as the strategies used to resolve the Sesotho VP syntactic ambiguity.