ADVERBS AS A WORD CATEGORY IN KINYAKYUSA

• Main Author: Amani Lusekelo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages 2010-01-01
• Series: Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages
• Subjects: ADVERBS; KINYAKYUSA; lexical; African languages; panandi; amasiku ga nkyeni; hierarchy
• Online Access: http://www.ncolctl.org/files/Adverbs-as-Word.pdf

Adverbs as a lexical class appear not to have received much attention in the study of African languages (Saah 2004) and Bantu languages in particular (cf. Nurse and Philippson 2003). This paper is an attempt at contributing to the knowledge of adverbs by providing their description in terms of the morphological structure, functions, and syntax in the Bantu language Kinyakyusa (M31). Findings point out that the adverbs in the language are realised by particles example ka-nunu 'well', as individual lexical items, like bwila 'always', reduplication of words e.g. panandi panandi 'very slowly' or word groups e.g. amasiku ga nkyeni 'in the coming days'. Also we found that the major clusters of adverbs existing in the language designate manner, frequency, magnitude, size-of-groups, location, and time. The syntax surrounding their co-occurrences observes restriction to the hierarchy: manner /frequency> magnitude/ size-ofgroups >location/temporal