The Semantics of the Tumbuka Compound Noun

Zimba Samson

Department of literature and languages, School of Humanities, The University of Zambia, P.O. Box 32 379, Lusaka.

E-mail: samsonzimba@yahoo.com; Tel: 0978028599, 0969755447

Accepted 31 January, 2014

The article on the semantics of the Tumbuka Compound noun is a research topic taken from a PhD research document titled "The Grammar of The Tumbuka Compound Noun: A Case Study of Tumbuka Compound Nouns of the Lundazi District  in The Eastern Province of Zambia". The PhD research study was carried in order to collect Tumbuka compound nouns after which the researcher discussed their semantics, morphology and syntax. The research was designed to be qualitative, relying on open ended and self administering questionnaires. Using these instruments face to face interwiews of 210 respondents were conducted. In addition, the researcher also used books and the in ternet in order to get secondary data before he turned to introspection as a Tumbuka himself. The research was done some villages of chiefs Mphamba, Magodi and Zumwanda were interviewed. This research study collected over 279 Tumbuka compound nouns were. The morphological analysis showed that Tumbuka compound words are agglutinatively composed with morphemes that play various functions. Semantically, it was observed that very few compound nouns directly derived their meanings from words that compose them. Most of them had meanings that had nothing to do with meanings of their individual words. Syntactically, it was noted that compound nouns were made from different parts of speech and that each word that made the nouns played specific roles and created networks of relationships with the other word or words within the compound nouns.

Keywords: used in the document