Unmarked possessives: Fact or fiction in Zulu grammar?

Abstract

In the new school syllabus for Zulu mother-tongue speakers, a distinction is made between two types of possessives, namely, marked and unmarked possessives. Marked possessives are possessives constructed by means of a genitive marker which links the possessor noun to the possession noun while unmarked possessives are so-called because of the lack of a genitive marker in their construction, as for instance in the following example: UNo-malanga ugeze ingane ubuso ‘Nomalanga washed the child's face’. Older grammarians viewed these forms purely from a syntactic point of view while in more recent times the interrelationship between the two constituting nouns has become the focal point of investigation. This has sparked off conflicting views as to how the relationship between these nouns should be defined in order to best account for these syntactic structures. In this article the various possibilities proposed by authors are investigated and evaluated and the conclusion is reached that ‘possession’ is not the distinguishing feature of these forms and that it is consequently unjustified to regard them as unmarked possessives.