The Grammar of the Tumbuka Compound Noun: A Case  Study of Tumbuka Compound Nouns of the Lundazi District  in the Eastern Province of Zambia

Zimba Samson

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

E-mail: samsonzimba@yahoo.com Phone: (i.) 0978 028599      (ii). 0969755447

Accepted 29 November 2013

Abstract

The research on the Tumbuka Compound nouns was carried out not only to draw a list of compound nouns that the Tumbuka people of Lundazi district use, but also discuss their semantics, morphology as well as syntax. It was designed to use the qualitative and free face to face approaches when collecting data.  In addition, the study relied on both primary and secondary sources for collecting data coupled with introspection.   It made use of open ended and self administered. The researcher interviewed villagers and teachers of chiefs Mphamba, Magodi and Zumwanda. These respondents were randomly selected (Cooper and Schindler, 2003; Johnson, 1994 and Eresmell, 1994).  Over 200 compound nouns were collected which later were subjected to semantic, morphological and syntactic analyses. The morphological analysis showed that Tumbuka compound words are made by more than one root which had morphemes that in most cases played various roles. It was at the morphological level of analysis that locatives were discovered. This particular article discusses the Tumbuka Locative morphemes placed in various positions of linguistic structures. 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, all the words that make up compound nouns are related as they functionally co-ordinate with each other. Secondly, the syntactic structure of compound nouns follow the usual structure of normal statements except that in compound nouns nominal prefixes are added to the first root in order to convert the whole structure to a nominal that it becomes. In addition, without adding the said prefix, the words that make up compound nouns in Tumbuka would stand individually in an utterance. Finally, most compound nouns do use words that are descriptive in nature.

Keywords : Locatives:   The morphemes that serve to indicate the position of the item under discussion are locatives.  Preposition: Prepositions are words that serve to connect major words  (usually nouns) to other parts of the sentence. Noun class: A noun class is a nominal prefix (morpheme) which includes within it all nouns that belong to it for one reason or the other.  Morphemes: Morphemes are abstract meaningful minimal grammatical units that build up words. Concordial agreement: This refers to syntactic relationships that occur between morphemes, words or groups of words within sentences or at times across sentences.