Nyumba ‘dom’ w języku i kulturze suahili
Nyumba ‘home’ in the Suahili language and culture

Summary/Abstract: The author presents a semantic analysis of the Suahili lexeme nyumba ‘home’ on the basis of an electronic corpus of that language and other sources (dictionaries, oral literature). She reconstructs a rich semantic network of senses deriving from the basic sense of nyumba, which network constitutes a conceptual Gestalt: home is a building, the family’s dwelling place and a person’s shelter characterized by certain specific features. Semantic extensions profile various attributes of the prototypical meaning, hiding some of them and providing the basis for other senses, linked with one another through metaphor or metonymy. For example, an extension of the profile ‘dwelling place’ is a contextual usage of nyumba in reference to the family, which in turn may be viewed as the basis of extended meanings ‘marriage’ or ‘wife’.

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