Reconciling animacy and noun class in Bantu
Claire Halpert, Christopher Hammerly
May 2025 

This squib investigates the relationship between animacy and the noun class system of Bantu languages. Combining facts from various phenomena across the family that are sensitive to animacy, 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 show 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. NOTE: This paper was originally submitted for review in September 2024; this version has been revised after an initial round of review, and resubmitted in May 2025.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/009061 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Under review
keywords:	bantu, noun class, animacy, gender, person-animacy hierarchy, agreement, person, number, phi-features, anti-agreement, animacy agreement, coordination, semantics, morphology, syntax
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