Examining Semantic and Pragmatic Roles of Prepositions in Kinyarwanda

Abstract

The article examines the roles of prepositions in Kinyarwanda language, the motivation behind the examination was that most studies on Kinyarwanda are on contentive words, and those that have touched on Kinyarwanda prepositions in passing are incomplete, thus desires investigation to fulfill this gap. The Schema and cognitive semantics theories guided the analysis under the Leipzig glossing rules’ representation. Unstructured interviews and critical document analysis were methods of data gathering from three Nyarwanda natives who were selected purposively as they are trilingual speakers of English, Kiswahili, and Kinyarwanda. The work revealed that prepositions of Kinyarwanda have socio-cultural significance and their meanings are conceptual. In other words, prepositions are vehicles for multi-communicative facts as they indicate time, dimensional, relative positions, places, instrumentality, passage, conjunctive and causation facets. The paper argues that functors including prepositions have a direct philosophical stance to native speakers, as one preposition may present different contextual semantics. From this base, storing or keeping and documenting functors in Kinyarwanda specifically preposition remain tangible phenomena in the current sphere of research.