Hausa Substantives: A Natural Semantic Meta-language Approach
Keywords:
Hausa primesAbstract
This study presents an inventory of Hausa semantic primes. It analyses one category of the primes, namely substantives. The study was inspired by a large number of researches, such as (Ameka, 1994; Goddard, 2008; Peeters, 1994), investigating the existence of semantic primitives and their grammar in typologically unrelated languages. However, little has been done on African languages, with the exception of Ewe language. The primes were arrived at by asking three Hausa native speakers the equivalence of the English primes given by Goddard (2002a). The proposed Hausa exponents offered by the respondents were harmonized and subjected to rigorous analysis through the Natural Semantic Meta-language (NSM) framework. Reasons for considering an exponent as a prime over a seemingly possible candidate were given. It was found out that Hausa primes correspond in many ways to those of English, however, the former has fewer than the letter, 53 and 62 respectively, because some Hausa exponents are polysemous. As for the substantives, although they differ strikingly in their combinatorial behaviour from those of English, the basic argument of NSM is justified.
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