| dc.description.abstract | This paper examines the intransitive verb class in Kalanga, a minority language
predominantly spoken in the southwestern parts of Zimbabwe. The paper focuses
on split intransitivity, a linguistic concept that describes the division of intransitive
verbs into two subclasses — unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs. Split
intransitivity, also known as unaccusativity, was first formulated by Perlmutter
(1978) under what he termed the Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH). According to the
Relational Grammar (RG) framework within which split intransitivity was first
investigated, the single Noun Phrase (NP) of an unaccusative verb patterns like an
object of a transitive verb while the single NP of an unergative verb patterns like
the subject of a transitive verb. This study tries three tests for split intransitivity in
Kalanga, namely the -ik-, -is- and –il- verbal extensions. Some sentences which
use the three verbal extensions were selected from a large corpus of Kalanga data
and analysed. Kalanga speaking research assistants provided other sentences which
they constructed using the three verbal extensions. The results of the study show
that verbs that take the –ik- and the –il- verbal extensions are unergative. To a
large extent, unaccusative verbs do not take the two verbal extensions. It is also
demonstrated that the causative extension –is- is an unreliable test for intransitivity
in Kalanga since it produces grammatical sentences when used with both kinds of
intransitive verbs, including with transitive verbs. | en |
