2026/03/25 by Claire Halpert, Christopher Hammerly · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Archaeology and Rock Art Studies #Australian Indigenous Culture and History #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · doi:10.16995/glossa.17968
openalex publication_date 2026/03/25 · openalex created_date 2026/03/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
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.