Inflection

It has long been recognised that words in isiXhosa must be classed into at least two categories: simple and complex. Words like xa ‘when’, ngoku ‘now’, njalo ‘like that’ seem to be minimal (smallest) units and there seems to be no way to analyse them or break them down further into recognizable parts. On the other hand, the words umfundi ‘learner’, abasebenzi ‘workers’, isithethi ‘speaker’ are made up of several parts:

• um(fund)i ‘learner/student’
• aba(sebenz)i ‘workers/employees’
• isi(theth)i ‘speaker’

Traditionally, meaning-bearing parts of a complex word are called morphemes. It is held that morphemes are the minimal units of meaning in a language: they can no further be broken down into meaningful parts. The morpheme therefore is primarily seen as the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words.

Morphemes are arranged in a particular order, much depending on the part of speech of that particular word. Each morpheme has a distinct grammatical function. As a whole, the word is a meaningful unit of sounds.

Most morphemes are meaningful in one way or another. They may be meaningful either by contributing lexically (semantically) to the content of a word or in the sense of performing a grammatical function (Kosch, 2006).

Inflection is the realisation of morphosyntactic features i.e., notions such as case, which are relevant to both morphology and syntax, through morphological means. Morphosyntactic features is that part of syntax for which morphology is relevant, such as the definition of word-classes, like noun and verbs, or the specification of categoriessuch as Tense and Number. A morphosyntactic feature is one which specifies a value for morphosyntactic property (e.g., [+past]) which is morphological but required by the syntax (Bauer, 2004: 875).

In general, we speak of inflection expressing morphosyntactic information, syntactic information that is expressed morphologically. This includes the abstract syntactic categories of tense, aspect, number, and case. It involves the formation of grammatical forms (past, present, future, singular, plural, masculine, feminine, neuter, and so on) of a single lexeme, i.e., a word with a specific sound and a specific meaning. Its shape may vary depending on syntactic context. The use of these grammatical forms is generally dictated by sentence structure (Aronoff & Fudeman, 2005: 46). Inflection varies from one language to another more than any other systematic aspect of language.

Items which are responsible for supplying the core meaning of a word are roots/stems; compare the following root: -bhal-

• Utitshala ubhala incwadi. ‘The teacher writes a book.’
• Utitshala ubhalisisaincwadi. ‘The teacher writes the book thoroughly.’
• Utitshala ubona umbhalo. ‘The teacher sees an inscription.’
• Utitshala ungumbhali. ‘The teacher is an author.’

A look at the first, second and fourth examples shows lexical contribution to the words through the formation of a number of lexically distinct (though still related) items. In the second example an additional meaning has been added to the original verb through using a suffix. While in the third and fourth examples the insertion of a prefix and suffix are responsible for the creation of new lexical items in the form of nouns. Thus, morphemes such as those above, which can affect a word on the semantic level, are referred to as derivational or content morphemes/affixes and the morphological process is known as derivation. This occurs in word formation as the process of obtaining new words by adding affixes to existing new words by adding affixes to existing words or stems (Crystal, 1993: 99). As an example, we may illustrate this process by the formation of intetho ‘speech’, isithethi ‘speaker’ and umthetho ‘law’ from the verb -thetha ‘speak’. Derivational affixes may be responsible for a change in the class membership (word category) of a word or they may leave the class membership unchanged. Kosch (2006: 114) distinguishes between class-changing and class-maintaining derivational processes.

From the above discussion, it is clear that inflectional morphemes behave differently from derivational ones: they alter the form of the word without changing either its part of speech or its meaning (generally speaking). These inflectional morphemes create various forms of a word to conform to different functional roles in a sentence or in discourse. On nouns and pronouns, for example, inflectional morphemes serve to mark grammatical functions like number. On verbs, they mark such things as tense and aspect, while on qualificatives they serve to indicate degree. Inflectional morphology is more productive than derivational morphology.

Kosch (2006: 87), identifies affixes responsible for inflectional processes as having the following characteristics:

• They do not create new lexical items but merely produce a variety of forms of a simple lexical item, for example, the inclusion of the passive suffix, whereby the subject plays a passive part as an agent.
• The verb will just produce another form of the same lexical item as in: -pha ‘give’ < -phiwa ‘be given’, -tya ‘eat’ < -tyiwa ‘be eaten’, -va ‘hear’ < -viwa ‘be heard’.
• They generally have a constant demarcated grammatical meaning whereby most examples may be inflected for past tense by means of the suffix -ile, and add a regular, predictable meaning or function to an item. The suffixation of -el- will predictably add the qualification of applicative ‘do for/on behalf’ to the verb.
  • Ndithengela umama ilokhwe. ‘I am buying a dress for my mother.’
  • Utata usebenzela ifemeli yakhe. ‘Father works for his family.’
  • Umama uthungela umntwana ilokhwe. ‘Mother sews a dress for the child.’
• They have a grammatical meaning or function that is general enough to allow their combination with a large number of appropriate items in a particular category. They are said to be productive, since their grammatical meaning or function is widely applicable, for example, most verbs can be inflected for past tense by means of the suffix -ile or one of its allomorphs.
  • Ndithengile izolo ‘I bought yesterday’
  • Utata usebenzile ‘Father worked’
  • Umama uthungile ‘Mother sewed’
• They usually constitute a fixed and limited set in a language. No new items can arbitrarily be added to the already existing number of inflectional affixes (e.g., aspectual, tense and class gender morphemes).
• In cases where both inflectional and derivational affixes co-occur, the derivational affixes generally (but not necessarily) occur closer to the root/stem than the inflectional affixes.
  • -funda ‘learn’
  • root -fund- + inflectional -a
  • root -fund- + inflectional affix -a
  • -fundisa ‘teach’
  • root -fund- + derivational affix -is- inflectional affix -a.
• Inflectional affixes typically appear, though not exclusively in the syntax of a language. They serve to establish correct grammatical relationships between the forms to which they are attached and other parts of the sentence. In the Bantu languages such relationships are established through a system of class gender (i.e., concordial agreement).
  • Bonke abantwana bakatata bayavuya. ‘All my father’s children are happy.’
  • Zonke izinja zasekhaya zifuna ukutya. ‘All of my family’s dogs need food.’
• Inflectional affixes obligatorily occur in their appropriate grammatical context, that is, each of the agreement morphemes in the preceding examples is compulsory and cannot be replaced by any other agreement morpheme. Inflectional affixes are not able to change the class membership (word category) of a word or stem. All forms below belongs to a verbal word category:
  • -vala ‘close’ > valwa ‘be closed’
  • -sika ‘cut’ > sikwa ‘be cut’
  • -luma ‘bite’ > lunywa ‘be bitten’

Gender

The term Gender is appropriate only for the grammatical category of Natural Gender, which includes just nouns referring to sexual beings. Grammatical Gender is simply the same category found among the nouns of Bantu and the Amerindian languages, and usually referred to as “Noun Class” (Corbett, 1991: 43-49) or “Inflected Class” (Aronoff, 1993: 64-65). Grammatical Gender and Natural Gender are not one and the same category and must be distinguished. Grammatical categories like Noun Class are arbitrarily determined by grammar, while in ordinary language “gender” refers to natural classes of sexed objects. The current terms “Natural” and “Grammatical Gender” imply that these are two subcategories of the category, which is not true. Sex gender is irrelevant in the Class gender system of the Bantu languages. One of the features which Guthrie (1948) pointed out as characterising a language as belonging to the Bantu language family is that there is no sex reference in their concordial system, including personal pronouns, that is, distinctions such as ‘he/him/his’ versus ‘she/her/hers’ are absent. The same concordial morphemes and pronouns are used for both sexes (Kosch, 2006: 90).

Nouns may be recognised morphologically, i.e., there are certain morphemes which may occur with nouns. All nouns in Bantu languages are specified for a certain noun class and these noun classes are recognised through prefixes which are also known as noun class prefixes. Thus, Gender is not a nominal category in the Bantu languages but only Noun Class. Thus, in Bantu languages objects are not assigned properties like masculine, feminine, or neuter. As already been stated above, the grammatical gender which characterises these languages is called class gender, because nouns are grouped together into classes in a grammatically significant way. The noun generates grammatical agreement by means of class prefixes, also termed gender number prefixes.

Gender agreement must be observed in all parts of the utterance which are linked to the noun. The noun is the element which controls the concordial agreement with pronouns, adjectives, nominal relatives, and verbs and is known as the controller, while the element whose form is determined by the agreement is the target. Compare agreement in the following adjectival constructions:

• Class 1: Umntu (controller) omdala (target) ‘old person’
• Class 2: Abantu (controller) abadala (target) ‘old people’
• Class 7: Isikolo (controller) esincinci (target) ‘small school’
• Class 8: Izikolo (controller) ezincinci (target) ‘small schools’
• Class 9: Indlu (controller) enkulu (target) ‘big house’
• Class 10: Izindlu (controller) ezinkulu (target) ‘big houses’

Both the nouns and the adjectives carry overt gender markers. As can be seen from the above examples, concordial morphemes are not necessarily identical in shape to the class prefix of the nouns which they are linked to. Each noun class generates its own set of concords and they change predictably and consistently according to the particular grammatical context in which they are used.

There are as many as twenty different noun classes, that is, if numbered according to the international numbering system, originally proposed by Meinhof (1906). The number of noun classes may be less if we follow the numbering system proposed by other grammarians like Doke (1965) who group singular and plural forms together into one class. That is, class 1 (singular) and class 2 (plural) are labelled ‘class 1’, whilst class 3 (singular) and class 4 (plural) are labelled ‘class 2’ and so on. When a regular countable singular form is rendered plural, no new content is added to the word.

• Class 1:
  • um-ntu ‘person’
  • um-fazi ‘woman’
  • um-limi ‘farmer’
• Class 1a:
  • u-nina ‘her/his mother’
  • u-mama ‘mother’
  • u-bawo ‘father’
• Class 2:
  • aba-ntu ‘people’
  • aba-fazi ‘women’
  • aba-limi ‘farmers’
• Class 2a:
  • oo-nina ‘their mothers’
  • oo-mama ‘mothers’
  • oo-bawo ‘fathers’
• Class 3:
  • um-lambo ‘river’
  • um-zi ‘homestead’
  • um-lenze ‘leg’
• Class 4:
  • imi-lambo ‘rivers’
  • imi-zi ‘homesteads’
  • imi-lenze ‘legs’

Up to class 10, nouns in the uneven classes (i.e., 1, 3, 5, 7, 9) generally express singular, while nouns in the classes with even numbers (i.e., 2, 4, 6, 8, 10) express the corresponding plural forms as proposed by Meinhof (1906). Beyond class 10 the association of singular or plural with a particular class is not so patterned (Kosch, 2006). Some singular may form their plural in a non-corresponding class. Certain nouns in class 1 have their plural in class 6.

• umXhosa - amaXhosa ‘a Xhosa / Xhosas’
• umZulu - amaZulu ‘a Zulu / Zulus’

Some nouns in class 9 have their plural in class 6:

• Inkwenkwe - amakhwenkwe ‘boy/boys’
• Intsimi - amasimi ‘field/fields’
• Intombazana - amantombazana ‘girl/girls’

The category of number is an agreement feature. Agreement morphemes serve as the grammatical ‘bonding agents’ between the subject noun and its verb or descriptive adjunct.

• isithulu esisebenzayo ‘a working deaf/hearing-disabled person’
• izithulu ezisebenzayo ‘working deaf/ disabled-people’

The affixes which indicate number also simultaneously indicate one of the many genders into which nouns are classified in the Bantu languages (i.e., class 1, 2, 3).

Number

Number, whose common functions are singular, dual and plural, is another grammatical category generally taken to be inflectional. Number is always marked by a bound morpheme, usually located inside Case markers where the two are discrete, even though it is part of grammatical agreement which holds across words in phrases cf. Du Plessis (1997). Number is referential only among nouns, for only nouns referentially distinguish individuals and aggregations. The expression of number is thus built into the noun class system: specific classes are paired and used to derive plural meanings from singular meanings, or vice versa. Such class pairings are referred to as genders. Number does not change the meaning of a word when it changes its quantity.

Number refers to quantities. In the Bantu languages both singularity and plurality are marked overtly by means of prefixes.

• Singular:
  • um-ntwana ‘child’
  • i-sele ‘frog’
  • i-nja ‘dog’
• Plural:
  • aba-ntwana ‘children’
  • ama-sele ‘frogs’
  • izi-nja ‘dogs’

Person

The category of person always includes ‘a distinction between first (the speaker) and second (the person addressed). There is normally at least a third person, referring to person or things which are neither speaking nor addressed’ (Kosch, 2006: 93). Universally, there are three persons, and all spoken languages have all three. Nouns are always third person, and first and second person forms are always pronouns. The major differences among languages are in the plural, especially the first-person plural. Here a language may distinguish between a form meaning ‘me and others, but not you’, which we call exclusive form, and an inclusive form, meaning ‘me and others, including you’. As an inflectional category, person, like gender, is often most prominently displayed through agreement, specifically agreement of verbs with their subject or object, and some languages have quite elaborate systems of person markings on the verb (Aronoff & Fudeman, 2005: 159).

In speech situations participants are generally referred to as persons, that is the first person (speaker) and the second person (the person spoken to). The topic of discussion (persons or things other than the speaker and hearer is referred to as the third person. The category of person overlaps with number, which means that ‘person’ and ‘number’ are always expressed simultaneously by the same element:

• 1st person singular mna ‘I’
• 1st person plural thina ‘we’
• 2nd person singular wena ‘you’
• 2nd second person plural nina ‘you’
• 3rd person singular yena ‘he/she’
• 3rd person plural bona ‘they’

Third person includes a large range of pronouns relating to the various noun classes (Kosch, 2006: 93).

• Class 1: yena ‘he/she’
• Class 2: bona ‘they’
• Class 3: wona ‘it’
• Class 4: yona ‘they’
• Class 5: lona ‘it’
• Class 6: wona ‘they’

In Bantu languages it has become customary to refer to person in the case of the first and second person only, and to speak of classes in the case of third person, since all the noun classes represent the grammatical third person. Nevertheless, with reference to animate beings (irrespective of the noun class to which they might belong), third person is also used.

Case

Case is a nominal category which is controlled by syntax. Case expresses relations between nouns, and nouns and verbs in a phrase. Case is marked by free adpositions in other words various positions, as indicated below:

• (USipho) ubhalele uyise ileta ngosiba ngasendlwini. ‘Sipho wrote father a letter with a pen next to the house.’
  • uSipho appears in the Nominative to indicate its syntactic role as subject.
  • ileta is in the accusative to indicate that it plays the role the role of direct object.
  • uyise is in the dative because it is the direct object.
  • usiba and indlu are in the instrumental, the former because it represents the means of writing and the latter because it represents the place at which the latter was written.

Du Plessis (1997: 21), points out that Case is never expressed by simple affixation in Bantu languages. Case is a set of categories as indicated above which are determined solely by syntax and has nothing to do with the lexicon.

In Bantu languages, formal marking of nouns to indicate their syntactic relation to other elements in a sentence is mainly absent or very restricted in comparison with case markings in languages of the fusional type. The noun maintains the same shape in the so-called nominative, dative and accusative cases (Kosch, 2006: 95).

Many Bantu languages are known to have a relatively free word order. Word order in the Bantu languages seems to be a more typically grammatical device than inflection (Kosch, 2006: 97). Although the basic word order of the vast majority of these languages is SVO, permutations of this order are common. And yet, this variability in word order is not free. Rather, the various word orders differ in their semantic and /or pragmatic interpretation, and their appropriateness depends on the discourse context. Even if the basic word order of a sentence should be changed, there are agreement markers which are able to remove any disambiguity, preventing confusion and allowing a distinction.

• Subject-verb-object
  • Umntwana usela ubisi. ‘Child drinks milk.’
  • Umama uthenga ilokhwe. ‘Mother buys a dress.’
• Object – subject- verb
  • Ubisi umntwana uyalusela. ‘Milk the child drinks (it).’
  • Ilokhwe umama uyayithenga. ‘The dress mother buys (it).’
• Object-verb-subject
  • Ubisi luyaselwa ngumntwana. ‘Milk is drunk by the child.’
  • Ilokhwe iyathengwa ngumama. ‘The dress is sewn by mother.’

From the above, it is clear that information structure is encoded in a variety of ways, including prosody, morphological devices such as markers and word order. From the above examples show that Bantu languages also employ word order to encode grammatical relations.

Kosch (2006) asserts that the early documentations of Bantu language grammars by European missionaries, attempts were made to draw parallels between case-inflections of forms in the European languages and in the Bantu languages. The results were not very rewarding, since words in the Bantu languages do not display inflectional paradigms which would even warrant the recognition of cases as they are known traditionally. The Bantu languages usually mark syntactic relations by means of word order and affixation rather than modifications of words.

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