Delimitación geográfica

This study argued that personal names do reflect the gender status of the name bearer and benefited a lot from the insights of pragmatics. Pragmatics is an analytical approach in linguistics which involves itself with contextual considerations when coming up with a meaning of a name. It studies how people comprehend and produce a communicative act (Pearce, 1931). Name giving is another form of a speech act. Pfukwa (2007) says that pragmatics considers the speakers’ intended meaning and the receivers’ perceived meaning. Pragmatics is a vast term that overlaps into socio-linguistics, psycholinguistics, syntax, morphology and semantics. Pragmatics brings important dimensions in this study as it looks at personal names in as far as they reflect the gender status of the name bearers. Mamvura (2013:119) says “Pragmatics aims to explain the way factors outside of language contribute to the meanings which speakers communicate using language.” Pragmatics entails the speakers’ intended meaning and the receiver will perceive the message sent to him or her. By giving a person a name among the Shona, the namer is also guided by the gender status of the person to be named. This suggests names can be analysed pragmatically and the work of Van Langendonck (2001) reflects the significance of pragmatics in onomastics analysis. The present study used pragmatics as a tool for analysis and discussion of gendered personal names.

Using pragmatics, the present study draws a lot of insights from the concepts of presupposition, deixs, performative, implicature, conversational maxims and speech acts. There are various forms of pragmatic meaning which comes in handy on this research on how personal names can reflect the gender status of the name bearer. Presupposition as a concept under pragmatics refers to what is taken by the speaker to be “...common ground” (Stalnaker, 1978:321 in Makondo 2009) of the hearers in the naming process or to be accepted without challenge. Makondo (2009) says this happens only when speakers rely on shared assumptions and expectations. Deixis refers to what a certain statement means in a communication act under a given context (Grundy, 2000 in Makondo, 2009).

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Performative as a concept found under pragmatics implies that by each utterance a namer does not only say something but also does certain functions like giving information. Yule (1996:132) says that names are speech acts that execute actions like requesting, commanding, questioning and informing. Makondo (2009) has it that naming generates various kinds of meanings and consequences, both personal and social. It is this capability found in names that the present study looks at how personal names can reflect the gender status of the name bearer. Jacobs (1990) says that personal names are more than merely identification tags, encoded in them are, above all, our particular life stories, and narratives in which we have our individual being. The potential of names of telling our life stories and individual being means that personal names have the potential of differentiating people on gender lines. Zezuru personal names such as Rudo (Love) for girls and Simba (Power) for boys respectively do categorise people along gender lines. From a pragmatic point of view, naming is an important socio- linguistic act and the word chosen to refer to a new baby has enormous symbolic power. It identifies the person sending messages to members of society about who an individual is. Alford (1987:51) in Makondo (2009) says, “The name expresses hope, prayer, perpetuate a cultural, religious tradition of the name bearer”.

Pragmatic implicature as a concept refers to a situation when a namer uses names (...imply, suggest or mean, as distinct from what the other speaker literally says (Grice 1975, Sperber and Wilson 1986/95:182) in Mavhura (2014). According to Makondo (2009) an implicature is a proposition not explicitly communicated by utterance. It studies the invisible, or how one recognizes what is meant even when it is not actually said or written. This is often called the connotative or inference meaning under semiotic and semantic disciplines respectively (Makondo, 2009).

The cooperative principle argues that formulated namers adhere to four maxims of quantity (informativeness), quality (truthfulness), relation (relevance) and manner (clarity) (Parkers and Riley, 2000:12-13 in Mamvura 2014).

Makondo (2009) says that the four maxims are self encompassed in Shona personal names. He gave the example of the masculine name Tonderai (Remember) which reminds an individual or group of whatever has happened in their lives. The feminine name Sekai (laugh at) denotes joyous moment usually marked by laughter. Pragmatics shares a lot with semantics by looking

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at the use of context to make inferences about meaning. The theory of operationalism has it that the meanings of words or names are deduced in the contexts in which they are used. Akwanysa (1996:23) in Makondo (2009) refers to this process of deducing the meaning of a word using the context in which it is used as a theory interpretation. Epstein and Kole (1998:266) refer to this prerequisite condition as “context of situation or context of utterance”. From Epstein and Kole’s views, by context of situation it means that every utterance occurs in a culturally determined context of situation. With reference to Zezuru personal names this means that the meaning of a name can only be understood if the context in which the naming occurs is understood. It is this context which determines whether a name is feminine or masculine resulting in gendered names being given to people as forms of identity. Leslie and Skipper (1990:273) say, “Taking the context in consideration when trying to come up with a meaning of a name is imperative as the meanings of names are the result of complex social negotiations, learned, interpreted and reified through socialisation”. Obeng (1998) in Makondo (2009) also emphasize the importance of the social context in naming when he says: “Names in Akana as in other cultures are pointers to their users’ hopes, dreams and aspirations.They reflect geographical environment as well as fears, religious beliefs and philosophy of life and death. Children’s names may even provide insights into important cultural or socio-political events at the time of their birth”. It is through socialisation that the element of gender comes in which will give rise to gender-based names. Gender is a result of social construction and it is then reinforced through naming as individuals are given names which suit their gender status.