The Sesotho riddle as a poetic text

Abstract

This paper illustrates that the Sesotho riddle, like the Sesotho proverb, is poetic in nature. Several poetic devices such as parallelism, contrast, idiophones, repetitions and others contribute to its poetic nature. There are some syntactic features that operate at different levels of word, word group, phrases and sentences that help to make the riddle concise and rhythmic as well as memorable. These linguistic modifications of word group and sentence arrangements are seen to be communicative strategies needed in a riddling game.