A quantitative analysis of the morphology, morphophonology and semantic import of the Lusoga noun

Abstract

In this article it is shown how distributional corpus analysis may be used to start the description of a (mostly) undocumented language. The approach is illustrated for Lusoga (JE16), an eastern interlacustrine Bantu language spoken in and around Jinja, Uganda. The topic is the noun in Lusoga, with three levels receiving particular attention: the morphological, morphophonological and semantic. In a first section we show that a relative distribution of the type and token counts for each noun class in combination with a weighted two-dimensional noun class system is a most powerful way to visualize the strength of each node and each link in the structure. In a second section we proceed with an indication of how a quantified enumeration of both nominal morphophonology and noun constructions cum linked meanings provides for a representative picture of the various noun-building issues. In a third and final section, we then argue in favour of a three-dimensional semantic-import view of nouns, with as axes noun classes, semantic categories, and corpus frequencies.' This is not only a novel but also a most revealing and promising avenue to decode the underlying semantic system of the noun in Lusoga, as well as the noun in any other Bantu language.