ANALYSING SEAN TEMBO’S “MENSTRUATION” STATEMENT CONTEXTUALLY.
By Sile Mubukwanu
DISCLAIMER: The views I will discuss here are entirely mine and therefore do not represent any group of people or any organization including my great party the mighty UPND.
In linguistics there’s a component of study called “semantics”. Under this component of study, there is a topic called ” vocabulary” which has a sub topic called ” contextual vocabulary”.
Vocabulary means- meaning. Contextual vocabulary means- meaning according to a context. In linguistics we believe no word has a stand alone meaning but has different meanings based on the context it has been used in. For illustrative purposes, let’s take the word “RUNNING” – NYAMBE is good at “running” and MUBITA is running his father’s businesses both have the word “running” in them but the two words don’t have the same meaning in the two contexts.
Therefore it’s grammatically wrong to single a word out and examine it’s meaning devoid of a given context.
In the Sean Tembo statement, one can easily be tempted to rush to the commonly known meaning of the word “menstruation” but examining the meaning under the light of the context it has been used, linguists like myself will argue convincingly that the statement is devoid of any grammatical harm in it. Therefore the move by some of our colleagues in Livingstone of reporting Sean Tembo to police over the utterance though socially commendable but grammatically the charge cannot stand in court.
My considered opinion 🙏.
