Sammendrag
The questions, 'What is a good idiomatic data of a language?' and 'Who is a sophisticated native speaker are ones that often need to be tackled by a researcher working on a language. In Amidu (1997), evidence was presented that showed that contrary to traditional claims, classes 1/2 mu-/wa- contain inanimate nouns and noun phrases. For reasons that cannot be explained, researchers, mostly Indo-Europeans but including Africans, have attempted to discredit or dismiss the evidence. In this paper we present two NPs mtoto wa bandia 'toy, lit. toy child' with plural watoto wa bandia, and mtoto wa meza 'table drawer' with plural watoto wa bandia as evidence of inanimate denoting NPs that inflect in classes 1/2, the so-called exclusive animate classes. Synonyms such as mwanasesere 'toy'/wanasesere 'toys' and mtoto wa mchezo 'play toy, lit. play child', with plural watoto wa mchezo are used to support our claim that the traditional descriptions are not well grounded. We present evidence of active and passive constructions involving the NPs and conclude that when a researcher discovers an omission in a grammatical work, it is his/her duty to bring the information to the attention of readers and colleagues. It is not the role of the researcher to deny the evidence so that omissions made by Indo-European and other scholars can be upheld or protected. The claim that classes 1/2 of Kiswahili are exclusively animate classes is therefore false and misleading from a scientific point of view and on the strength of native speaker evidence, as well as native speaker rejection of attempts to make the inflections those of classes 3/4 in Kiswahili.
Vis fullstendig beskrivelse
