| dc.description.abstract | This work set out to study the processes of word formation both in German and in
Kiswahili with a case study of nominal compounds and derivation in order to find out
the similarities and differences in the formation of nominal compounds and derivatives.
Both languages are spoken within more than just the borders of one country and as
such are also used in more than just one field. The two languages belong to different
language families: German belongs to the Indo-European languages while Kiswahili
belongs to the Bantu group of languages.
As a theoretical framework, X-bar theory was chosen to guide this work. The theory is a
lexical theory which was a reaction to generative grammar and states that word
formation is an independent component and the “head constituent” is central to the
inner structure of a complex word. To provide a corpus for the analysis, the newspapers:
Taifa Leo, Mtanzania and Nipashe were used for Kiswahili and “Der Spiegel”, a German
magazine was used for German. The corpus contained 182 words which were used for
the analysis and they were selected through random sampling from the above stated
sources.
Chapter one covers the introduction to the work which includes the background,
problem statement, objectives, hypotheses, theoretical framework, scope and
limitations, methodology and rationale of the study. Chapter two gives an introduction
to morphology and describes the different types of morphemes in German and
Kiswahili. Chapter three discusses word formation and other processes of expanding
vocabulary. Various word formation processes are also discussed here in brief. Chapter
four deals with compounding and discusses the classification of compounds in both
German and Kiswahili. Chapter five covers derivation and shows the different ways of
forming new words from this process in these two languages. Chapter six deals with a
contrastive analysis of the findings of the research and gives recommendations and the
conclusion. The research has shown that the processes of nominal compounding and
derivation are more productive in German than in Kiswahili. | en_US |
