Identifying, descriptive and associative copulatives in Xhosa structure and function

Abstract

In this article it is demonstrated that the traditional treatment of copulatives in South African languages is inadequate and misleading. The leading idea in the traditional grammars of these languages is that identifying, descriptive, and associative copulatives have identifying, descriptive, and associative functions, respectively; and that each type is discernible by a morphological structure of its own. It is argued in this article that some ‘identifying’ and ‘associative’ copulatives are, from a functional point of view, descriptive; and are henceforth reconsidered as ‘quasi-identifying’ and ‘quasi-associative’ respectively.