A Study of Lexical and Structural Sense Relations in ChiShona

This study is an investigation of sense relations in ChiShona. Sense relations is an intra-linguistic approach to studying meaning and it includes both words and sentences. There are lexical relations which describe the networks formed by words and also the structural relations which look at the different links between sentences. The former include synonymy, hyponymy, antonymy, metonymy and homonymy while the latter include paraphrase, contradiction, entailment and ambiguity. The thrust here is to find out the different sense relations and how lexical items and sentences relate to each other as espoused by the sense relations framework. Interdependence is the theme of this study, itself a tenet of the Structural-Holist approach adopted for this effort. The effect of words on the meanings of sentences has always been a matter of concern and the present study makes an attempt to show the links which exist between the two levels in terms of meaning using the sense relations. This involves interpretation, conceptualization and abstraction that would eventually provide a qualitative enquiry with a legitimate place in Linguistic Theory.