Prepositional and adverb phrases in Zulu: a linguistic and lexicographic problem

Abstract

The first issue in this article concerns the claim by Nkabinde (1993: 322) that there are no prepositions and primary adverbs in Zulu. The article is trying to show that there are prepositions and primary adverbs, although most adverbs are secondary parts of speech in Zulu. But the fact that prepositions do exist does not necessarily mean there are prepositional phrases. The second issue deals with the lemmatization of the categories, ‘preposition’ and ‘adverb’. It is suggested that lexicographers should list affixes (e-, o-, ka-, nga-, etc.) as separate entries rather than lemmatise the phrases in which they occur, and only give the phrases as illustrative examples.