Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTERS OF ARTS in the DEPARTMENT OF AFRICAN LANGUAGES at the UNIVERSITY OF ZULULAND, 2000. / Topics falling under evaluative morphology have been wrongly placed in most grammar books dealing with African languages. cf. Doke (1956), Ziervogel and Mabuza (1996) and Nyembezi (1965) have placed diminutives , augmentatives and reduplication of nominal stems under derivative forms of the nouns. They also place the evaluative verbal extensions under verbal derivatives. This situation has led to inadequate and misleading treatment of . such topics. Most scholars have treated these topics in passing. Less attention has been paid to this aspect of Zulu grammar. This study endeavours to highlight important aspects of evaluative morphology. We want to ascertain whether or not the branch of morphology known as evaluative morphology is worth pursuing in Zulu. We shall therefore develop a theoretical basis for Zulu evaluative morphology. This study will attempt to deal with some important aspects of evaluative morphology. These aspects are :evaluative affixes used with nominals, evaluative affixes used with personal names and evaluative affixes used with the verb. Non-evaluative affixes will be excluded from this study.

This dissertation investigates interactions between gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology in a sample of 100 African languages, and provides a method for assessing the role that these interactions play in the grammatical complexity of gender systems. The dissertation is organised around three research foci. First, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and number along the following dimensions: exponence, syncretism, indexation, correlations in type of marking, and gender assignment. The study provides evidence for the possibility that nominal features are organised in a relevance hierarchy. In addition, the study shows that animacy and lexical plurality play a crucial role in the distribution of special patterns of plural indexation. The study also shows that pervasive indexation systems in the language sample always involve both gender and number. Finally, the study shows how gender assignment can be used as a means for encoding variation in the countability properties of nouns and noun phrases. Second, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and evaluative morphology in the languages of the sample. Two types of interactions are found. The study shows that the distribution of the two types depends on three factors: the type of gender system, the number of gender distinctions and the possibility of assigning a noun to more than one gender. Third, the dissertation investigates the role that interactions of gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology play in the absolute complexity of gender. The study proposes a metric for gender complexity and uses this metric to compute complexity scores for the languages of the sample. The results suggest that the gender systems of the language sample lean toward high complexity, that genealogically related languages have the same or similar complexity scores, and that the distribution of the outliers can often be understood as the result of language contact.