ELICITATION AND ARRANGEMENT OF MEANINGS IN THE
LEXICOGRAPHY OF BANTU LANGUAGES
PhD Candidate (Linguistics) (Oriikiriza C.)
ABSTRACT
This thesis is concerned with the elicitation and arrangement of meanings of words in the
lexicography of Bantu languages. The problem of study was whether the multiple
meanings of words are predictable from the semantic structure of language, and whether
they can be arranged in a consistent order from the same structure. The study limited
itself to the conceptual meanings of words. The objectives of the study were to find a
method of prediction of conceptual multiple meanings of words and to find a consistent
method of arrangement of the meanings. The rationale of the study was that such a
method, if discovered, would be of much assistance to efforts of writing dictionaries in
Bantu languages, which for long have persisted with only glossary-like dictionaries, and
minimal dictionaries at most. The search of the method was based on the hypothesis that
conceptual multiple meanings of words are predictable according to the principle of
semantico-syntactic interface (i.e. isomorphism) and that they are orderable in a
consistent arrangement according to the alphasyntactico-semantic sequence. From the
interpretation of data collected, the first hypothesis was born out. The second hypothesis
had four variables out of which three were born out, and one became inconclusive. The
variables are arrangement of meanings according to the increasing complexity of
semantic patterns, arrangement of meanings of words within semantic patterns according
to the increasing complexity of semantic categories and arrangement of meanings with
the same semantic formalisation according to the order of historical importance of usage
labels. The other variable is arrangement of meanings according to the alphabetical place
of the entry or subentry. It is the second last variable that was inconclusive according to
the test implication, but the rest were confirmed. The study recommends the use of the
principle of semantico-syntactic isomorphism for the elicitation of conceptual multiple
meanings for compilation of dictionaries in Bantu languages, and arrangement of the
same according to the alphasyntactico-semantic sequence. Pointers to further research are
outlined as arrangement of same formalisation meanings according to the usage criterion,
prediction and elicitation of non-literal meanings (i.e. idiomatic meanings) and the
relationship between cognate meanings. Others are elicitation and arrangement of
meanings for determiners, interjections and conjunctions, as functors, and category
saturated sentences.