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Verbal Alternations in Sesotho: A Case of Lexical Semantics

Abstract This study discusses two types of verbal alternation in Sesothothat have the same syntactic structure, but differ in their semantic representations and in their lexical syntax structures. The first scenario: ‘Ntate o motsutse lenala la ntja’(Father extracted dog’s nail) alternating with ‘Ntja e motsutse lenala la yona’ (A dog extracted its nail). The alternating sentence can be interpreted as: ‘A dog had someone extract its nail’. The second scenario is: ‘Mong o robile molala wa Thabo’ (Someone broke Thabo’s neck) alternating with ‘Thabo o robile molala wa hae’(Thabo broke his neck). We can interpret the alternating sentence as: ‘Thabo is the possessor of the neck that suffers the break. Based on a more fine-grained approach of thematic roles and based on a semantic representation of the events encoded by these verbs the results show that these two forms have different interpretations due to different lexical semantic properties.