Morphosyntactic discrepancies in representing the adjective equivalent in African WordNet with reference to Northern Sotho

This paper aims to highlight morphosyntactic discrepancies encountered in representing the adjective equivalent in African WordNet, with reference to Northern Sotho. Northern Sotho is an agglutinating language with rich and productive morphology. The language also features a disjunctive orthographic system. The orthography determines the attachment selection of morphemes. The immediate issue, in this paper, is the absence of a one-to-one correspondence between the adjective in English and that in Northern Sotho. The meaning equivalent of the English adjective covers more than one morphosyntactic category in Northern Sotho. In addition, the categories’ structural diversity has a bearing on representation considerations. In some of these categories the stem suffices to represent the specific category unambiguously while in others there is a need to incorporate affixes with the stem. The challenge is to categorize semantic equivalents of the English adjective as such, while retaining their separate morphosyntactic tags in Northern Sotho, in harmony with the typology of the language. The present paper proposes morphologically feasible ways of representing this varied equivalent of the English adjective in Northern Sotho.