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.
Read more about this topic: Sotho Grammar
Famous quotes containing the words parts of, parts and/or speech:
“Even in ordinary speech we call a person unreasonable whose outlook is narrow, who is conscious of one thing only at a time, and who is consequently the prey of his own caprice, whilst we describe a person as reasonable whose outlook is comprehensive, who is capable of looking at more than one side of a question and of grasping a number of details as parts of a whole.”
—G. Dawes Hicks (1862–1941)
“The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.”
—Bible: New Testament Colossians 4:6.