A Study of the Trait of Temporality in isiZulu—By Contrasting and Comparing with Chinese and English

Both time and space are involved in all events.As the tool of communicating and thinking, human languages have temporality and spatiality.However, these two traits are different from language to language.While some languages are temporality-prominent, others are spatiality-prominent.By contrasting and comparing with Chinese and English, this paper examines the verb and tense in isiZulu.It shows that in isiZulu the verb plays a key role in word-formation, i.e.the verb stem is the basis, from which a large number of nouns are derived.Grammatical categories are normally attached to the verb in the syntactic structure.Besides, IsiZulu has a large number of tenses and aspects, which are syntactically compulsory.In addition, isiZulu has the so-called deficient verbs which play an important part in encoding the temporal relations of events.All of these traits can lead us to conclude that isiZulu is a temporality-prominent language.