Abstract:
This study discusses two types of verbal alternation in Sesothothat have the same syntactic structure, but differ in their semantic representations and in their lexical syntax structures. The first scenario: ‘Ntate o motsutse lenala la ntja’(Father extracted dog’s nail) alternating with ‘Ntja e motsutse lenala la yona’ (A dog extracted its nail). The alternating sentence can be interpreted as: ‘A dog had someone extract its nail’. The second scenario is: ‘Mong o robile molala wa Thabo’ (Someone broke Thabo’s neck) alternating with ‘Thabo o robile molala wa hae’(Thabo broke his neck). We can interpret the alternating sentence as: ‘Thabo is the possessor of the neck that suffers the break. Based on a more fine-grained approach of thematic roles and based on a semantic representation of the events encoded by these verbs the results show that these two forms have different interpretations due to different lexical semantic properties.
