After a brief discussion of the goals of scientific theory, especially in Linguistics, the article explores the scientifically arrived at morphological categories, "verbaliser" and "extension" in Shona. It reviews existing descriptive accounts of these categories and suggests that, if they were treated as members of a single category rather than as they have been treated traditionally, a variety of previously unanswerable questions could begin to be addressed through new research. The proposed recategorisation would treat "verbaliser" as the less productive members of the set of toneless derivational morphemes which, otherwise, consists of "extensions".
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