Tense and aspect taxonomies among Tshivhenda mother tongue speakers of English : implications for Black South African English

Abstract

Whereas research has exponentially increased on the understanding of new varieties of English worldwide, there is a paucity of studies that have assessed the degree to which Black South African English is shared and understood across a wider spectrum of the Bantu language speaking communities in South Africa. Because of this, research has been inconclusive on causes and frequencies of identified linguistic properties of the variety. This study investigated the tense and aspect usages in English among mother tongue speakers of Tshivenda learners to develop a taxonomy of characteristic features, sources of production and frequency of occurrence in an educational context. The study focused more attention on the role of mother tongue substrate system which transfers its features to the target language. After a contrastive analysis of the collected data, learners’ essays and storytelling, the findings of the study indicate that the occurrence of tense and aspect properties among grade 11 learners is first language (L1) induced and rule-governed. Secondly, the results show that the features occur with high frequency, suggesting that they are institutionalised. In particular, the study denotes that expressions of temporal reasoning follow the L1 grammatical structure that favours external formation to the verb phrase; i.e., verbal arguments are preferred to morphological conjugations. Based on these findings, it is concluded that the logic of temporal reasoning, described as Bantu language logic as developed by Makalela (2004, 2007, and 2013), rather than grammatical forms, is transferred in the production of BSAE tense and aspect properties. When seen in this light, it is evident that BSAE cuts across different Bantu languages of South Africa, it has evolved towards being an endonormative variety, relying on its own internal logic (substrate forms) to be a new and distinct variety of English. In the end, recommendations for more robust and large scale studies in high prestige domains such as the media and institutions of higher learning are made for augmentation of these findings.