THIS IS THIS, AND HERE ARE SOME EXAMPLES: VERBALISERS AND EXTENSIONS IN SHONA

After a brief discussion of the goals of scientific theory, especially in Linguistics, the article explores the scientifically arrived at morphological categories, ‘verbaliser ’ and ‘extension ’ in Shona. It reviews existing descriptive accounts of these categories and suggests that, if they were treated as members of a single category rather than as they have been treated traditionally, a variety of previously unanswerable questions could begin to be addressed through new research. The proposed recategorisation would treat ‘verbaliser ’ as the less productive members of the set of toneless derivational morphemes which, otherwise, consists of ‘extensions’. As we engage in the scientific study of language, some of us linguists [in Langacker’s (1975) terms, the ‘theory people’)] are predisposed to focus our efforts on using linguistic data for building theories, and others of us (in Langacker’s terms, the ‘language people’) prefer to direct our efforts towards using theories to understand more deeply the linguistic data w