Bakweri Verb Morphology
Annie K. Hawkinson · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 1986
This thesis has two objectives.The first is informational.Bakweri, the language studied, is an unwritten Bantu language spoken in Cameroon in West Africa.It is hoped that the data described will contribute to our understanding of Bantu grammatical structure in general and provoke further research into the processes of semantic differentiation and diachronic development in these languages.The second goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate the value of certain theortical constructs in the analysis of language.The concepts of interest are those of meaning, as opposed to message, and system, substance, and value.Meaning is defined as "the information which a linguistic form conveys in any and all instances of its use".Message is that idea or notion which is in fe rre d from the use of a particular meaning in a given context.Meanings cannot be understood in isolation from one another: they acquire their value through semantic opposition to other meanings in a given semantic system.The grammar of a language consists of a number of different systems, each of which conveys information concerning a given semantic substance, such as time, focus, nersonr number, etc.Within each system there are different forms which signal different values of the substance classified.So, for example, plural in the system of number in a language which has no dual means more than one.In a language which does exihibit dual this is not necessarily the case; plural may mean only more than two.By analyzing