Die deelwoord as 'n ánder vorm van die werkwoord

Abstract

Afrikaans is an inflection-poor language and, as expected, a literature review revealed that little agreement exists on how the participle in Afrikaans should be analysed and described. These differences are reflected in three basic issues, namely: a) inaccurate terminology use and vague formulations; b) controversy in arguments about the morphological process (including the distinction between inflection or derivation) responsible for the formation of participles; and c) inconsistency in the recognition of the participle as a form of the verb and whether the form of the verb that is used with auxiliaries (het in the past tense and word/is in the passive) should be regarded as participles. The incongruences above are in fact all variations of the same basic problem: the distinction between inflection and derivation. In an attempt to solve the vague and conflicting descriptions of the participle in Afrikaans, this article proposes a distinction between the participle form of the verb and the form of the verb that is used in periphrastic constructions (PC) - i.e. the past tense and the passive.