Syntactic differences between adjectives and relative words in Setswana and isiZulu

Abstract

The study investigates the syntactic differences between adjectives and relative words in Setswana and isiZulu. Setswana and isiZulu are from the same Bantu language family and both share certain general characteristics such as agglutinative morphology, but they differ in orthography, i.e. conjunctive and disjunctive orthography. The aim of the article is to show the differences between the adjective and relative words of isiZulu and Setswana in sentences. The intention is to display the possibility of comparing isiZulu and Setswana without comparing them to English. English is a valuable resource, but it should not be promoted at the expense of indigenous languages. The focus of this study is on the ordering and occurrence of the adjectives and to investigate whether Setswana and isiZulu adjectives and relatives do occur in a specific order when used attributively. A descriptive research design and qualitative approach are used to collect and analyse secondary data from the existing data to solve the research questions, such as: Do Setswana/isiZulu adjectives and relatives occur in a specific manner and can nouns and adjectives be conjoined in Setswana and isiZulu?