Nominalisation and semantic shift in selected isiXhosa nouns

Abstract

This study addresses the process of nominalisation in isiXhosa to establish its historical development and implications on the writing and sense of words. Nominalisation, an important feature of scientific writing, enables information concentration as well as grammatical functions such as subject, complement and prepositional completive. Integration of systemic functional linguistics provides a powerful platform for the explanations of linguistic phenomena using grammatical metaphor and nominalisation. The theoretical framework of the study is rooted in systemic functional linguistics. The study employed systemic functional linguistics tools for unpacking language into its ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. A set of words from three dictionaries was picked for further analysis. The selection criteria were words that have undergone nominalisation and have therefore significantly changed in form or meaning. The selected words were subjected to changes in spellings, meanings and use and were compared to similar words in the three dictionaries selected for the study. Both the historical and social contexts in which such changes have come about are documented, providing insights into factors that play a role in language evolution. Findings of this study revealed that some words have changed in writing, while others have changed in meaning, but the original nominalisation process has not changed. Semantic changes can be linguistic or non-linguistic, and they can represent social, cultural, historical or economic developments. It is recommended that future studies on nominalisation should investigate the implications of understanding the nominalisation processes in isiXhosa for application to natural language processing and computational linguistics.