THE SCOPE OF THE STUDY AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF SOME EXISTING VIEWS

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The structural approach

The next step forward in Bantu linguistic description in South Africa came in 1958 with the appearance of a doctoral thesis by E.B. van Wyk entitled Woordverdeling in Noord-Sotho en Zoeloe: ‘n Bydrae tot die vraagstuk van woord-identifikasie in die Bantoetale (Word division in Northern Sotho and Zulu: A contribution to the problem of word identification in the Bantu languages) and, although it did not have a direct impact on the analysis of Tswana, it was to steer the grammatical description of the Bantu languages in yet a new direction. We will therefore first look at the general theoretical premises of this model and then deal with the influence it exerted on the linguistic analysis of adverbials in the Bantu languages.

ADVERB VS ADVERBIAL

In order to establish the adverbial as a clause element, a basic distinction needs to be drawn between the terms ‘adverb’ and ‘adverbial’. According to the existing classifications by Cole (1955) and others, adverbs are a heterogenous group of items in Tswana which contrast with other main word-classes such as nouns, pronouns, adjectives, possessives and verbs. They function in a variety of ways, modifying other elements in clause structure, such as qualificatives and other adverbials (descriptives), but their most frequent role is to provide more information about an action which is performed or a state of affairs which exists. Semantically, adverbs can be related to such questions as Kae? (Where?), Leng? (When?), Jang? (How?), Goreng? (Why?), Le mang? (With whom?), Ka eng? 42 (With what?), Ke mang? (By whom?), Ke eng? (By what?) and Ga kae? (How many times?). Once this is done, the functional equivalence of multi-word units immediately becomes apparent.

CLAUSE STRUCTURE

In order to state general rules about the syntactic structure of the clause in Tswana, it is necessary to constantly refer to smaller syntactic units than the clause itself. Our first task must therefore be to explain what these smaller syntactic units are that we need to distinguish within clause structure to be able to deal with the adverbial as an element of clause structure. Since not much is said about the clause as a syntactic element in existing Tswana grammars, we will first look at different views on the units constituting a simple or basic sentence since this type of sentence takes a clause as a unitary constituent and simple sentences and clauses are therefore in most instances structurally equal.

Adverbs formed by adding a preposition to a base

Numerous adverbs are formed by adding prepositions to bases. The bases which are generally involved in the formation of adverbs of this kind are nouns, absolute pronouns, demonstratives and various qualificatives. A variety of prepositions can be added to these bases to form adverbs. These prepositions are usually grouped together according to the different semantic relations they express, for example locative, temporal, connective and agent. We will here merely list them6 with examples since they will be dealt with in detail when the semantic role of adverbials is discussed later in this chapter. The following prepositions can be used to form adverbs: .

THE SEMANTIC ROLES OF ADVERBIALS IN CLAUSE STRUCTURE

If we are to understand the semantic roles of adverbials in clause structure, we need to relate their semantic function to their structural features and distributional properties identified above on the basis of their surface structure appearance in clause structure. We distinguish several main categories of semantic roles for adverbials, in most instances with further subdivisions. Like Quirk et al. (1985) we begin with the category SPACE, since the expression of other categories is often achieved in terms of figurative extensions of spatial relations.

CONTENTS :

• 1. THE SCOPE OF THE STUDY AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF SOME EXISTING VIEWS
  • 1.1 INTRODUCTION
  • 1.2 OBJECTIVES
  • 1.3 RESEARCH METHOD AND SCOPE
  • 1.4 THE ILLUSTRATIVE MATERIAL
  • 1.5 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
    • 1.5.1 The traditional approach
    • 1.5.2 The Dokeian approach
    • 1.5.3 The structural approach
    • 1.5.4 Modern models
  • 1.6 CONCLUSION
• 2. THE ADVERBIAL AS A CLAUSE ELEMENT
  • 2.1 INTRODUCTION
  • 2.2 ADVERB VS ADVERBIAL
  • 2.3 THE CLAUSE AS A SYNTACTIC UNIT
  • 2.4 CLAUSE STRUCTURE
  • 2.5 CONCLUSION
• 3. THE DESCRIPTION OF ADVERBIALS IN CLAUSE STRUCTURE
  • 3.1 INTRODUCTION
  • 3.2 THE STRUCTURAL REALIZATION OF ADVERBIALS IN CLAUSE STRUCTURE
    • 3.2.1 Basic adverbs
    • 3.2.2 Words from other word categories used as adverbs
    • 3.2.3 Derived adverbs
      • 3.2.3.1 Adverbs formed by adding a noun class prefix to an adjective stem
      • 3.2.3.2 Adverbials formed by adding an adverbial prefix to a stem
      • 3.2.3.3 Adverbs formed by adding the locative suffix -ng to nouns
      • 3.2.3.4 Adverbs formed by adding a preposition to a base
    • 3.2.4 Adverbial phrases
  • 3.3 THE SYNTAX OF ADVERBIALS IN CLAUSE STRUCTURE
    • 3.3.1 Initial position
    • 3.3.2 Medial position
    • 3.3.3 End position
  • 3.4 THE SEMANTIC ROLES OF ADVERBIALS IN CLAUSE STRUCTURE
    • 3.4.1 Space
    • 3.4.2 Time
    • 3.4.3 Process
    • 3.4.4 Regard
    • 3.4.5 Contingency
    • 3.4.6 Modality
    • 3.4.7 Degree
  • 3.5 ADVERBIALS AS MODIFIERS IN CLAUSE STRUCTURE
  • 3.6 THE FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES OF ADVERBIALS IN CLAUSE STRUCTURE
  • 3.7 CONCLUSION
• 4. THE CLASSIFICATION OF ADVERBIALS IN CLAUSE STRUCTURE
  • 4.1 INTRODUCTION
  • 4.2 ADJUNCTS
    • 4.2.1 The identification of adjuncts
    • 4.2.2 Subcategories of adjuncts
      • 4.2.2.1 Predication adjuncts
      • 4.2.2.2 Sentence adjuncts
    • 4.2.3 The functional realization of adjuncts
    • 4.2.3.1 Adjuncts of space
    • 4.2.3.2 Adjuncts of time
    • 4.2.3.3 Adjuncts of process
    • 4.2.3.4 Adjuncts of regard
  • 4.3 SUBJUNCTS
• 5. GENERAL CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

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A GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS OF THE TSWANA ADVERBIAL