A Comparative Analysis Of Chinese "Eat" And Botswana "Ja"

Chinese verb "chi"(吃) and Setswana "Ja" is a commonly used verb in both languages. It is for this reason that linguists, from early on, started carrying out research on "chi" from different perspectives.The VO construction of Chinese "chi" and Setswana "Ja" is a rather complex grammatical phenomenon.The paper attempts to carry out research on the prototypical, metaphoric and the metonymic meaning of Chinese VO and Setswana VO construction. The main parts of the paper include:Syntactic Function:"chi" and "Ja" function as predicates, the core or main verbs in sentences. We analyse the function of "chi" for instance with noun, adjective, verb etc combination. In languages, the "chi" or "Ja" noun collocation is common however the verb collocations are rather rare.The second part we study the prototypic, metaphoric meaning of Chinese "chi+O" and Setswana "Ja+O".We use the Chinese dictionary to classify and describe the prototypic and metaphoric meaning of "ch+O" on the other hand we use the university of Botswana corpus to classify and describe the prototypic and metaphoric meaning of "Ja+O".We then analyse similarities and differences. The third part we analyze the Chinese "chi+O" and Setswana "Ja+O" metaphoric and metonymic meaning, the similarities and differences in both languagesThe fourth part is the conclusion, summing up and point out the shortcomings in the research.