Semantics of Kiswahili Adjectives

Abstract

This paper presents a panoramic survey of Kiswahili adjectives by examining the following aspects of meaning: semantic classes, gradability, antonymy, and intensification. The data for this study were collected from newspapers, books, questionnaire and interview with ten University students from Dar es Salaam University College of Education. The study is guided by Dixons (1977, 1982, 2004) semantic classes. The paper makes a priori assumption that Kiswahili adjectives convey several meanings which cannot be stricto senso classified into discrete semantic classes as proposed by Dixon (1977, 1982, 2004). It is noted that one Kiswahili adjective can express an infinite number of meanings, some of which may not be directly related to the original meaning which, consequently, makes the whole exercise of classification of adjectives into semantic types laborious and backbreaking. Looking at the behaviour of the adjective category, one cannot but say, there are more adjective meaning types in Kiswahili than those proposed by previous Kiswahili scholars, and that the meanings which are taken as basic in dictionaries ignore many other extra meanings expressed by Kiswahili adjectives.