A lexico-semantic analysis of sense relations in EkeGusii circumcision social varieties

This paper investigates how EkeGusii conveys meaning and offers an insightful analysis of the relationships between meanings in the social varieties of EkeGusii circumcision. EkeGusii is a Bantu language spoken in Southwestern Kenya by about 2.6 million native speakers. The language is free of observable isoglosses, but within it are diglossia situations. Diglossia is a condition in society where two varieties of language exist side by side and each has a certain role. The paper focuses on levels of sameness and oppositeness as well as the homonymy-polysemy interface within EkeGusii circumcision social varieties. Sense relations are universal in all languages in the world. Sense relation is any relation between lexical units in the semantic system of a language. It is a relationship between words as expressed in synonymy, hyponymy, homonymy, and polysemy, as well as antonymy. These relationships are entered by being contrasted or substituted. A sense relation involving a word makes the word have the same or nearly the same meaning as another word. These words cannot be used in another context to bring out the same sense. Lexical semantic components of the lexical pragmatic approach are used. The lexical semantic component treats words as encoding concepts. Participatory observation and introspection by jotting down insightful ways of using language are used to elicit useful data. Data is also collected from a sample of twelve native speakers of EkeGusii. Data analysis involves classifying the lexical items into the respective parts of speech, glossing the words into English, and identifying the sense relations to which the words belong. Findings show that sense is realized as a case of style or register. Findings also point out that context plays a significant role in establishing meaning. Pitch and stress determine meaning in context. Differences in tone result in homonyms: words that have different meanings but are pronounced or spelled the same. Sense realization follows the different ways in which the male and the female genders manipulate language. It is recommended that more research on sense relations in other Bantu languages be carried out as a way of explaining sense relations further.