Affectivity and Metaphors in Kiswahili

Abstract

This paper revisits the syntax of inalienable possessions in Swahili. It further interrogates the internal relationships between the constituents of affective (intimate possession) constructions in Swahili. The privileged treatment of constructions of inalienable possession is a relatively cross linguistic phenomenon. In Swahili, several construction types in which inalienability is grammatically represented have been identified. In a particular construction type which involves “a person affected (patient) and a part of the body or other thing intimately connected with them (property), featuring as two independent arguments of the verb rather than components of a single noun phrase” (Dzahene-Quarshie 2010) such as Akili imemruka ‘He is out of his mind’ the intimate possession often occurs as the subject of a typically intransitive verb and its owner as a direct object of the verb marked in the verb by an object prefix. Often the intimate possession and the verb constitute collocations. That is there is a concomitant co-occurrence of certain intimate possessions with certain verbs. Contextually, these constructions often occur in the narrative continuum and express abstract phenomena such as emotions and various states of mind. Using data drawn from various sources and a descriptive approach, the paper aims to establish that some affective constructions are metaphoric in that, often there is no direct correlation between the intimate possession and the corresponding verb in terms of semantic mapping. This demonstrates that beyond the established characteristics of affective constructions in the literature, they are also often metaphoric in terms of meaning.