A typology of northwestern Bantu gender systems

Author:

Di Garbo Francesca1,Verkerk Annemarie2

Affiliation:

1. Department of Languages, General Linguistics , University of Helsinki , PL 24 (Unioninkatu 40) 00014 , Helsinki , Finland

2. Department of Language Science and Technology , Saarland University , Saarbrücken , Germany

Abstract

Abstract Northwestern Bantu is the most linguistically diverse area of the Bantu-speaking world. Several unusual grammatical gender systems are reported for this area, but there has been a lack of comprehensive comparative studies. This article is a typological investigation of northwestern Bantu gender systems based on a sample of 179 languages. We study the distribution of various patterns of animacy-based agreement in the languages of the sample and in relationship with the Agreement Hierarchy. We find that animacy-based agreement is widespread in northwestern Bantu. If restricted to animate nouns, it tends to coexist in stable variation with syntactic agreement. When generalized to both animate and inanimate nouns, animacy-based agreement appears to contribute to the erosion of gender marking. In line with the prediction of the Agreement Hierarchy, we find that animacy-based agreement is prevalent with verbs and pronouns. Within the noun phrase, it spreads in ways that are suggestive of a hierarchy of syntactic integration between nouns and adnominal modifiers, which had gone unnoticed in the existing literature. These results have important implications for current models of Bantu gender systems and shed new light on animacy effects in the diachrony of gender more generally.

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Subject

Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics

Reference95 articles.

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2. Audring, Jenny. 2019. Canonical, complex, complicated? In Francesca Di Garbo, Bruno Olsson Bernhad Wälchli (eds.), Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity: General issues and areal and language-specific studies, vol. 1, 15–52. Berlin: Language Science Press.

3. Augustin, MaryAnne. 2010. Selected features of syntax and information structure in Lika (Bantu D.20). Dallas, TX: Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics MA thesis.

4. Bearth, Thomas. 2003. Syntax. In Derek Nurse & Gérard Philippson (eds.), The Bantu languages, 121–142. New York: Routledge.

5. Beaulieu, Jeremy, Brian C. O’Meara & M. J. Donoghue. 2013. Identifying hidden rate changes in the evolution of a binary morphological character: The evolution of plant habit in campanulid angiosperms. Systematic Biology 62. 725–737. https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syt034.

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