A linguistic analysis of Sesotho personal sentence names

Abstract

This thesis provides a linguistic analysis of Sesotho personal names that have the structure of sentences. It examines the internal structure of these names, their linguistic status and their meanings. The internal structure of the names is discussed in the second chapter of the thesis. In this chapter the names are categorized into the declarative names, the interrogative names and the imperative names. Each category of names is assigned a word structure rule (WSR) that describes its structure. The component parts of sentence names are nouns, concords, verbs, tense markers, question words, imperative markers and negation morphemes. Concords function in the names to indicate unison and individualism, gender and definiteness. Nouns in sentence names make the names specific. Tense markers are used in the names to indicate tense and verbs carry the semantic content of the names meaning. Question words, imperative markers and negation morphemes are used to classify the names into different categories. The third chapter addresses the question of how sentence names should be classified. It is argued that these names should be classified as words. This is because they display properties of words such as internal stability, positional mobility and uninterruptability. These names are nouns because they can be replaced with pronouns, they can be inflected for number, they are written as single words and their tone is different from that of their corresponding sentences. The sentence names are also regarded as words because they are derived by word formation processes namely conversion and clipping. The fourth chapter relates to the question of the meanings behind personal sentence names. It is noted that the meanings of sentence names may be derived from the individual words that make up the names, especially the verbs as they carry the semantic content of the names. The names have the connotations of joy, pride, gratitude, frustrations, disappointment, surprise, series of deaths, condolences, calamity, need for care, illegitimacy and conflicts. The syntactic meaning of the names is discussed in relation to the argument structure of the predicates that make up sentence names. Besides the lexical meanings and the syntactic meanings, it is noted that there are pragmatic factors that help in interpreting the names. These pragmatic meanings of the names are studied in relation to the communication that is attained through the names