Kousatief in Zoeloe

Abstract

The aim of this study was to find out what constituted in Zulu the phenumenon which in the Bantu languages is generally known as the Causative. A corpus of 50 arbitrarily chosen sentences was gleaned :from two Zulu novels. Most of these sentences contained a verb which displayed formatives that are usually considered to be those which bring about the causative derivation. To complete the corpus verbs containing other formatives were also included, mainly on the grounds of a hunch by the author that they might be causative derivations. These verbs and sentences were then put to a threefold test: morphological,syntactical and semantic. In each case a criterion was first worked out and then the verbs in the corpus were one by one measured against the respective yardstick. Morphologically the criterion consists in large parts of a ·transcription forrnula which is :made up of the subject concord of the doer-substantive plus the superordinate of all Zulu verbs i.e. -enza, plus the conjuctive-noun 'to be' i.e. ukuba plus the second concord of the done to-substantive plus subjunctive stem of the base form of the verb under test. Syntactically the criterion needed a newly-introduced subtantive replacing the subject of the basic sentence to become the object of the derived sentence. The state or process contained in the basic verb must however still be ascribed to the now new object of the derived sentence, whereas the derived verb must still be ascribed to the new subject. Semantically the criterion calls for a verb which is inherently a state or a process to be changed into an action-process. Verbs which are action-processes from the outset naturally do not fit the criterion. Of importance here was also the semantic features of agent, patient etc. which substantatives have, and the relation in which such nouns have with the verb. The outcome of these 3 tests, in each case led to the same 32 verbs being pointed out as causatives. A significant conclusion reached was that only intransitive verbs could be be made, causative by means of a derivative formative. A further conclusion was that there are no exclusively causative formatives in Zulu. The causative is determined by a special semantic-syntactic interrelationship between the derived verb and the substantitives in the sentence , A causative sentence must contain an agent, a agent as object and a derived verb which has been changed into an action-process from a base form which was inherently a state or a process