Onomastics is a field of sociolinguistics that is today being exploited by cultural geographers as well as historians and scholars and students of heritage studies. It is in the light of this that this research ventures to bring to the fore how naming practices among the Shona have been used to communicate and describe natural phenomena. It does this by analysing personal names, those of dogs and those of places. When used with regards to toponyms, the names bring out how people map out a place and how they relate to it. When used in naming people, the names successfully funtion as a summary...

This monograph explores the possibility of applying communications and analytical philosophical models to the analyses of Shona advertisements.It adds on to the few theoretical frameworks for handling Shona adverts that currently exist. The research establishes that the basic human communication model is useful in the analyses of Shona avertisements only to a acertain extent as it leaves a gap which is filled by the Sterns model which was found to be able to handle the multidimensional elements of Shona advertising texts. The analytical philosophical models were found to be very...