Talk:Annotating Tumbuka

This page has developed nicely --Dorothee 13:51, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I am interested in the annotation of the last three words: nchunga kwa Mary translated as beans for Mary.

• is there no plural noun class prefix on nchunga?
• kwa looks like a complex word composed of kw-a, with kw as the noun class agreement marker and a as a possessive marker. ??

Could you help Jean :)

--Dorothee 10:37, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Nchunga is both singular as CL9 and plural as CL10. There are no affixes marking plurality. May be I could just add that CL10 on the glosses under nchunga 'beans'?

yes that would be good --Dorothee 20:22, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Kwa is simply a preposition and its not agreeing with any of the nouns. If it was used as an agreement marker, it would have been ku-a = kwa under class 16 which is a locative class.

I see.

I like to understand the relation between the prepositional phrase kwa Mary and the causative. Mary is the causee, and I was expecting Mary to occur as a direct object of the verb. So I am surprised to see it occur as a prepositional object. --Dorothee 20:22, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Let's compare the example above with the following example:

Here we have a passivized Causee, namely Temwa. The Causer, Temwani, occurs as an oblique object, that is as a prepositional phrase headed by na. Comparing the two phrase we see that kwa and na both are given as corresponding to the English prepositon by. Hm... --Dorothee 20:38, 20 February 2010 (UTC)