Sotho Grammar - Parts of Speech

Parts of Speech

Each complete Sesotho word belongs to some part of speech.

In form, some parts of speech (adjectives, enumeratives, some relatives, and all verbs) are radical stems, which need affixes to form meaningful words; others (possessives and copulatives) are formed from full words by the employment of certain formatives; the rest (nouns, pronouns, adverbs, ideophones, conjunctives, and interjectives) are complete words themselves, which may or may not be modified with affixes to form new words.

The difference between the four types of qualificatives is merely in the concords used to associate them with the noun or pronoun they qualify. Since the simplest copulatives do not use any verbs whatsoever (zero copula), entire predicative sentences in Sesotho may be formed without the use of verbs.

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