South Africa’s rise in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and healthcare provider shortages have generated the need for community health workers (CHWs) in rural areas. However, roles and interactions with clinic staff are not well understood. Interviews with healthcare workers at community clinics in Limpopo Province revealed common themes, including resource scarcity, clinic-patient partnerships, management of NCDs, and collaboration between professionals. The data did not support CHW-physician interactions, necessitating further research to describe these practices and to evaluate CHWs’ impact on patient outcomes. CHW involvement in rural clinics is essential to patient-clinic partnerships and may help close treatment gaps in resource-poor areas.
The conjunctive and disjunctive forms in Xitsonga are examined with the purpose of presenting the distribution of these forms. While verbs in the conjunctive form are followed by some elements, the disjunctive is used when no element follows the verb. Xitsonga follows these basic patterns observed in other Bantu languages, but previous theories cannot explain all of the cases in which the conjunctive and disjunctive forms are distinguished. In previous work, three major approaches have been proposed: the constituency approach, the focus-based approach, and the information packaging approach. Xitsonga supports but also provides counterevidence to all of these approaches. This paper also re-examines the claim that the presence of conjunctive/disjunctive distinctions only exists in the present tense. Following Creissels (2014), we report that the conjunctive/disjunctive dichotomy is present in other tenses as well when prosodic patterns such as penultimate lengthening are further examined.
In Xitsonga, certain Aspectual Auxiliary verbs (AA verbs) appear with double subject agreement. While these AA verbs have been reported in the description of Xitsonga (Baumbach 1987: 250-252), a systematic morphosyntactic study of these constructions has not been undertaken. This study aims to fill this gap. An AA verb is marked with tense, aspect, mood, negation and relative clause markers and may occur in wh-questions. The lexical verb following the AA verb may be the target of verbal extensions (applicative and reciprocal), reflexive, causative and passive markers.
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