Lecture
African noun classes: Traditional analyses, current debates and future research
- Date
- Monday 17 April 2023
- Time
- Location
-
- Room
- Verbarium zaal (1.04)
Abstract
In this presentation, I discuss three main components of my past, recent and future research on noun classes. My research is discussed within the context of African noun class/gender systems and their acquisition and the broader typological context of agreement-based nominal classification systems. After introducing the dominant traditional approach to analysing noun classes, I examine some propositions in the recent literature on African noun classes to separate morphological classes from agreement classes (Pozdniakov 2010; Güldemann & Fiedler 2019; Hofherr & Creissels 2022; Sagna 2022). I address the question of the best way to analyse African noun class systems in order to enable comparison with other gender systems. To do so, I explore data from Eegimaa (Atlantic, Niger-Congo, southern Senegal) from the perspective of canonical typology. I argue that this approach is a promising way to analyse lexical hybrids and agreement mismatches in African noun class systems. My discussion of the acquisition of noun classes presents early findings of a longitudinal and cross-sectional study of Eegimaa-speaking children. I link my research methods and results to previous work on the acquisition of Bantu noun class systems (Demuth 2003; Demuth & Weschler 2012), and discuss the significance of this research in the broader field of child language acquisition. In the last part of my presentation, I discuss avenues for future research. This includes ongoing questions on child language acquisition research, and an introduction to a rare phenomenon of overt verb classification characterised by the use of the same linguistic means (noun class prefixes) to classify both nouns and verbs.