The polysemy of the Gĩkũyũ nouns

Abstract

Polysemy is a term used in semantic analysis to describe the situation in which a word has two or more related meanings.This study is a Cognitive Semantic account of the Gĩkũyũ nouns as productive sources of polysemous meanings. This study examined the polysemy of the Gĩkũyũ nouns through description of their semantic networks. While existing studies have contented with polysemy in the semantic field of body parts or just one noun, the present study has extended the analysis across twelve semantic fields which include Plants and fruits, animals, buildings among others. The aims of the study were to explore ways in which the Gĩkũyũ nouns branch providing extended meanings, how noun categories emerge from these various extended meanings, and how cognitive processes of metaphor and metonymy and cultural factors motivate the polysemy of these nouns. The researcher adopted the interpretivist philosophical systematic quest for theoretical answers and utilization of data for generation of and broader understanding of polysemy. The study adopted a qualitative descriptive research design that enabled effective collection and an in-depth analysis of the data. The target population were females and males aged above fifty years in the four locations of the Nyeri South sub-county namely Chinga North East, Chinga North West, Chinga SouthEast and Chinga North West . The informants were identified through the snowball sampling method where prior identified key informants helped in identifying the next suitable informants due to the difficulty of identifying people who are competent in Gĩkũyũ. A total of forty informants (twenty males and twenty females) were sampled for the study. To collect data, thirty- one nouns were purposively selected from a Kikuyu – English Vocabulary Dictionary. These nouns were put in different semantic fields and presented, through an open-ended questionnaire to the study participants. The questionnaire aimed at eliciting additional noun meanings not given in the dictionary. The polysemous meanings of each noun were put in a semantic network, showing how they were derived from either the prototypical or extended meaning and patterns formed from these meanings were then discussed. The study used the Cognitive Linguistic Approach, specifically, the Principled Polysemy Model as postulated by Tyler and Evans (2003, 2004). This model views polysemy in terms of radial semantic networks that centre on a prototypical sense. The findings led to several conclusions. First, Gĩkũyũ nouns are extended to have polysemous meanings in different semantic fields that derive from the prototypical connotations. While some of the meanings belong to the same nouncategory as the meaning they branch from, others belong to different categories. Secondly, metaphor and metonymy are the central processes that motivate the polysemy of the Gĩkũyũ nouns. Thirdly, socio- cultural factors, and not just linguistic phenomena, motivate the polysemy of these nouns. This study is important because it enhances the scholarly understanding of polysemy in Gĩkũyũ and contributes further to research in Cognitive Linguistics. The study recommends research on other categories of words in Gĩkũyũ so as to establish whether they are also productive sources of polysemy. Quintessentially, there is need for a comparative study in polysemy with national languages such as English and Kiswahili with a view to elevating Gĩkũyũ to a similar status.