Browsing by Author "Matambirofa, Francis"

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    Language use and the depiction of violence in pre-colonial Shona folk narratives
    (University of Namibia, 2016) Matambirofa, Francis
    Drawing illustrations chiefly from oral narratives, this article seeks to interrogate and dissect the imagining of violence in pre-colonial Shona society while paying special attention to the use of language of hatred, pain and injury therein. Language faithfully mirrors and gives away a society’s behavioural, spiritual, political, etc. construction. In view of the violence that has dogged Zimbabwe for several decades now, our point of departure is a polemical refutation of the traditionally held view that has one-sidedly idolised pre-colonial Shona society as peaceful and impliedly violence-free. While surely pre-colonial Shona society could never have been one marathon of violence, nevertheless, holding an analytical mirror to the past will reflect that the peaceful thesis does not constitute the whole truth either. The exaggerated image of a peaceful and innocent Shona society, we argue, was precipitated by a resurgent search for an African identity whose design was to reconnect with the past while countering the racist framing of blacks as a bloodthirsty lot to whose rescue the white man came. However folktales and romances, let alone pre-colonial history itself, betray, quite embarrassingly so for the one-sided view, as well as demonstrate that the Shona were not uniquely endowed with an incapacity for violence.
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    A preliminary description of the syntax and morphology of interrogatives in the Shona language
    (University of Namibia, 2017) Matambirofa, Francis
    This article describes some idiosyncratic properties of interrogative particles in the Shona language from the view point of their morphological and syntactic behaviour. This arises out of the observation that in syntactic structure, there are instances in which interrogatives can substitute for the nouns about whose enquiry they are made. It would make an interesting study to determine the extent to which interrogatives can stand as surrogate nouns. Shona marks for interrogatives using both segmental and supra-segmental strategies. The following are examples of segmental interrogative markers: sei ‘why’, ko? ‘Why/how come’, saka? ‘so?’, -ei? ‘why?’, chii? ‘what?’, ani? ‘who?’, -i? ‘what/when/which?’, ngani? ‘How many?’. Supra-segmentals generally use the strategy of placing high tone marking on specific segments. Moreover certain interrogatives can simultaneously combine within the same interrogative sentence, chiefly for emphasis. At the same time, there are some interrogatives that are not compatible with each other. In addition, interrogatives seem to have semantic features that are generally associated with [±Human], [±Count], [±Affirmation], etc., in addition to the common feature [+Interrogative]. This paper sought to examine how these features influence the syntax of interrogative sentences in terms of the compatibility and incompatibility properties of certain interrogative particles as well as determine how the same features pro-actively and ‘intelligently’ select the range of potential answers in the Shona language.