George Poulos

Word categories – prototypes and continua in southern bantu

In kontemporere kognitief-funksionele benaderings tot die interne or-ganisasie van onderskeidelik die primere leksikale kategoriee N(omina) en V(erba) staan die begrip kontinuum sentraal. Nogtans word die primere kategoriee nog steeds as onderling onafhanklike en diskrete kategoriee gesien. In ons ondersoek van die interrelasies tussen die primere leksikale kategoriee met vei-wysing na Zulu het ons bevind dat alhoewel prototipes van die kategoriee N(omina) en V(erba) in wese onafluinklike is word hulle tog aan mekaar geskakel op ′n kontinuum. Op hierdie kontinuum vorm die tradisionele Bantukategorie A(djektief) die sentrale skakel tussen die twee ekstreme kategoriee. Vandaar die gevolgtrekking dat N(omina) en V(erba) nie diskrete onafhanklike kategoriee is nie, maar wel ekstreme pole op ′n kontinuum van leksikale kategoriee.

Tagging an agglutinating language : a new look at word categories in the Southern African indigenous languages

Abstract Traditionally, the classification of word categories (or parts of speech) in African languages has been modelled on Western European languages without taking cognisance of the fact that the European languages and the African languages belong to different language types. Moreover, the classification of word categories in the European languages has been typically based on the highly questionable classical view of categorisation in general. These historical factors have had rather adverse implications for the various word categories which have been distinguished in the African languages up to this very day. In this paper, we critically explore these issues, and propose a rather revolutionary framework for the treatment of word categorisation in African languages. This new framework, as we shall point out, has significant implications for the units to be distinguished in a tagset as well as for the tagging of corpora in these languages

Towards a better understanding of the nature of the word in African languages

Abstract The analysis of the core linguistic element, the’ word’, has been a debatable issue in African languages ever since these languages were first written, and to this very day, linguists differ in their opinions on what truly constitutes a word in these languages. The very fact that the official languages of South Africa do not all conform to one specific writing system bears testimony to the differences in opinion that have prevailed in the analyses of these languages. The African languages are primarily agglutinating in structure which should be reflected in a common writing system, and not in the distinctly diverse disjunctive and conjunctive systems which have prevailed for over a century. In an article by Louwrens and Poulos (2006), the shortcomings of the disjunctive system of writing are discussed in detail. In this current article, the focus shifts to languages which use the conjunctive system of writing, and certain relevant issues on word structures are also drawn from other language types for example from an inflectional language such as Greek. By carrying out this type of typological investigation, it is believed that we might move closer towards a clearer understanding of the criteria which govern word boundaries in our African languages.

Describing Verbs in Disjoining Writing Systems

Many Bantu languages, especially in Southern Africa, have a writing system, where most verb morphemes preceding the verb stem and some suffixes are written as separate words. These languages have also other writing conventions, which differ from the way they are written in other related languages. These two systems are conventionally called disjoining and conjoining writing systems. Disjoining writing can be considered simply as an under-specified way of writing, but for computational description it is a challenge, especially if the system allows only continuous sequences of characters to be recognised as units of analysis. In order to reduce unnecessary ambiguity, verb morphemes should be isolated from such strings of characters that are real words.