Search

This article demonstrates the role played by culture in shaping the individual's construction of the meaning and experience of illness. It shows how culture plays a significant part in providing valuable insights into an individual's lived experiences and their perceptions of what constitutes their physical, psychological and/or emotional afflictions. It reveals that Basotho patients express cultural beliefs through idiomatic forms which merely allude to the real nature of their illness(es), and some Sesotho vocabulary that may be difficult to understand, especially when talking about sexually transmitted illnesses or conditions. The results show that cultural differences and taboo topics surrounding sexuality were a major cause of the communication barriers between patients and health care professionals. The article highlights that the cultural and social constructions of the people's illness experiences offer a valuable window into the unique design and complex nature of their value and belief systems that shape their everyday behaviours and constructions of and reactions to illness. It argues that these value and belief systems have the potential to yield significant insights into the nature or essence of the patients' cultural explanatory representations of their illness experiences. The article fills the gap that exists vis-a-vis the impact of subjective experiences and social constructions of health and illness among Basotho adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a distributional corpus analysis of the Northern Sotho noun and gender system. The aim is twofold: first, to assess whether the existing descriptions of the noun class system in Northern Sotho are corroborated by information provided by the analysis of a large electronic corpus for this language, with specific reference to singular-plural pairings, and second, to present a number of novel visualisation aids to characterise a noun class system (in a radar diagram) and a noun gender system (using a two-directional weighted representation) for Northern Sotho in particular, and for any Bantu language in general. The findings include the discovery of two new genders in Northern Sotho (i.e. class pairs 1/6 and 3/10), and also indicate that the Northern Sotho noun class system, and by extension any one for Bantu, should be seen as dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inversion structures, in which the logical subject appears in postverbal position, are a wide-spread phenomenon among Bantu languages. The paper presents an overview of inversion structures in Bantu languages and describes in detail the inversion constructions in the Southern Bantu language Northern Sotho. It argues that Northern Sotho shows only one inversion structure, namely the impersonal construction. I propose that constructions which arguably constitute cases of locative inversion in neighboring languages can be analysed as impersonal constructions with preposed locative constituents. Evidence from morphosyntax, syntax, intonation and discourse-pragmatics is investigated. The paper supports the claim made by Demuth (1990) and Baker (1992) for Southern Sotho. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]