The KENYANG SYNTAX: ADJECTIVES

Mbu Martha Njui                                          

Department of Linguistics & African Literature

University of Douala, Cameron

Email: mbumatha80@yahoo.Fr

ABSTRACT

One of the most important components of a sentence is the adjective. This part of speech is so common that people use it almost automatically, both in speech and in writing.   An adjective is a part of speech which describes, identifiers, or qualifies a noun or a pronoun. So basically, the function of an adjective is to modify a noun or a pronoun so that it will become more specific and interesting. The term “adjective”, as applied to Kenyang and most Bantu languages, usually applies only to a rather restricted set of words. However, in the wider sense, it can refer to any word that modifies a noun. The wider sense is used here. Kenyang adjectives have invariable forms, that is, they do not take concord markers, but instead, they remain constant regardless of the class of the noun they modify. All adjectives have one thing in common: they all follow the noun they modify, and require some kind of prefix whose class matches the preceding noun.   This paper describes the uses, types, and functions of adjectives as used in Kenyang, a Bantu Language spoken in the South West Region of Cameroon. The structural approach is adopted in the data presentation to highlight some of the cross –linguistic universals on the use of adjectives in order to properly characterized this linguistic feature in Kenyang

Keywords: Adjectives, Pure Adjectives, Categorical Function, Numeral Adjectives.