Abstract
This squib investigates the relationship between animacy and the noun class system of Bantu languages. Combining facts from various animacy-sensitive phenomena across the family, including anti-agreement, animacy override, and agreement resolution under conjunction, we argue that the featural properties of Bantu nouns directly encode a prominence hierarchy. We show that all nouns, regardless of the noun class expressed on the surface, are underlyingly specified for a core noun class, which encodes whether a noun is a human (class 1/2), non-human animate (class 9/10), or inanimate (class 7/8). We propose that core noun class is morphologically encoded by the final vowel found on many Bantu nouns, and syntactically encoded by the nominal categorizing head n using the features [±Animate] and [±Human]. We further argue that core noun class can be obscured by the stacking of multiple n’s within the nominal spine, creating a mismatch between the morphophonological expression of class within a noun versus the expression in agreement. We discuss the consequences of this proposal for the wider theory of Bantu noun class and theories of agreement.
Christopher M. Hammerly
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
My research interests include syntax and morphology, particularly the interface between our grammatical knowledge and processing abilities.