Morphological and Semantic Analysis of Kiswahili Deverbal Compound Nouns

Abstract

This paper deals with the analysis of the Kiswahili deverbal compound nouns in terms of their morphological structure and semantics. The paper reclassifies Kiswahili VN compound nouns into Kiswahili deverbal compound nouns. According to this study, these Kiswahili deverbal compound nounsarelargelycomposedofadeverbalnoun+noun. Thisstudyusestheheadednessprinciple and the endocentricity and exocentricity concepts as the theoretical framework for the study. In terms of its methodological orientation, this paper makes use of data collected chiefly from Kiswahili monolingual dictionaries as well as the English-Swahili bilingual dictionaries. The data was collected by identifying Kiswahili compound nouns containing a deverbal noun followed by a noun. In terms of morphology, the main findings of this study show that Kiswahili deverbal compound nouns such as mpigakinanda ‘organist’ kiuamagugu ‘weed killer’ and kipimaupepo ‘wind gauge’ are made up of a deverbal noun + noun. Productivity is also one of the findings connected to Kiswahili deverbal compound nouns. By productivity, it means some deverbal nouns combine with other nouns to produce a large number of Kiswahili deverbal compound nouns. From the semantic point of view, this study shows that Kiswahili deverbal compound nouns are basically headless compound nouns which do not exhibit a head-modifier relationship. These major results imply that Kiswahili compound nouns contain deverbal compound nouns among the most productive patterns found in this language.

Keywords: Deverbal noun, endocentricity, exocentricity, productivity, headedness Principle, transparency, Opaqueness, idiomatic compound nouns

DOI: 10.56279/jlle.v19i2.5