Sammendrag
The study, firstly, demonstrates how the pronoun nani 'who?' rather than nini 'what?' is used in Kiswahili naming strings. We illustrate in the process that a peculiarity of naming strings in Kiswahili is that WH nani appears to refer not to the name of a person or even the nouns jina/majina 'name/s' but rather to the person who bears a name. Secondly, the study reveals that nani is polysemic, i.e. it is a [±animate] denoting word that can also express the meaning of nini 'what?' in Kiswahili. The evidence illustrates how a common and allegedly animate denoting WH pronoun has the primary sense of the inanimate denoting WH pronoun nini while it is still a member of the so-called animate classes 1/2. Thirdly, we illustrate how predicate verbs connected with naming, mentioning or writing names take concords of classes 1/2 or 5/6 or both. We conclude that the key to the behaviour of nani lies in its polysemy. This underscores the limitations of semantic assignment rules in Bantu.
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