Investigating the ways of cooking and the properties of <i>cook</i> verbs in Nilamba (Bantu F31)

The motivation for the current study is based on the existing body of research on variations in the lexical semantic properties of cook verbs, particularly in the manner and result components of meaning across languages. However, there is a notable lack of contributions regarding this subject in Bantu languages, which limits our understanding of their properties in this context. As such, this article examines the lexical semantic properties of cook verbs in Nilamba, a Bantu language spoken in central Tanzania. We employed an experimental approach to gather cook verbs from Nilamba speakers through the use of video clips, images, and real-life events. From the field, we obtained nine cook verbs. Among these, six cook verbs encode the manner component of meaning in a lexeme, while three cook verbs encode the result component of meaning, which are morphologically marked by the short causative -i-. Our findings indicate that cook verbs in Nilamba encode both manner and result meanings. Manner verbs express the resultant state within the predicate modifier, while the resultant state in result verbs is inherently part of the verb itself. Furthermore, manner cook verbs are activity verbs, whereas result verbs involve causation, which engages different means/manner of cooking. So, they are accomplishment verbs.