ChiHwesa Diminutives: Morphology, Semantics, and a Radial Category Analysis

Abstract

Diminutive systems in Bantu languages have undergone diverse morphological and semantic developments, resulting in considerable cross-linguistic variations. However, the extent to which these developments are reflected in ChiHwesa remains unknown. This study investigated the morphology and semantics of diminutives in ChiHwesa, an under-described Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe. Particular attention was paid to their formation within the noun class system and the meanings associated with diminutive constructions. Guided by Jurafsky’s (1996) Radial Category Theory, data were collected through semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation, virtual ethnography, and corpus analysis. The findings show that ChiHwesa marks diminutivity through the prefixes /ka-/ (class 12) and /tu-/ (class 13), and employs the morphological processes of substitution and pre-prefixation, while class 13 exhibits allomorphic variation in certain contexts. Unlike some neighbouring Bantu languages that use suffixal diminutive strategies, ChiHwesa relies exclusively on noun class reassignment for diminutive formation. The findings further reveal that ChiHwesa diminutives form a radial semantic network in which the core meaning ‘child’ extends through metaphor and inference to related meanings such as ‘young’, ‘small’, ‘affectionate’, and ‘pejorative’, indicating the cognitive interconnectedness of diminutive meanings. The study contributes to Bantu evaluative morphology by demonstrating how an under-described language preserves a productive noun class-based diminutive system while developing language-specific semantic extensions.