The Morphosyntactic and Semantic Basis of Diminution and Augmentation in Shinyiha

Abstract

Among the strategies used to express diminution and augmentation in Bantulanguages is the use of particular prefixes in the Bantu Languages ' Noun ClassSystem. Being one of the Bantu languages, Shinyiha has its ways of formingdiminutives and augmentatives. Some of the ways coincide with those found inother Bantu languages. Yet other ways are unique to Shinyiha. To explore howdiminution and augmentation processes are effected and their semantic basisin Shinyiha is the concern of this paper. The paper offers a description anddiscussion of diminution and augmentation in terms of what noun classes areused as well as what the diminutives and augmentatives mean in Shinyiha. Insummary, the paper is concerned with the morphosyntactic and semantic basisof the two processes i.e. how the processes are morphosyntactically andsemantically realized. Guérois, et al (2017) ' Parameters of Bantumorphosyntactic variation ' are used to inform this paper, accounting for themorphosyntactic aspects of the paper. To explain the semantic basis ofdiminution and augmentation, Construal Operations proposed by Croft &Cruse (2004) are used. The findings indicate that in Shinyiha diminution isexpressed by noun classes 7/8 and 12/13. On the other hand, augmentation isexpressed by noun classes 3/4 and 5/6. In each case different meanings areexpressed in addition to diminution and augmentation. It is concluded thatdiminution and augmentation have semantic basis as they form part of humancommunication strategies