Noun classification systems in Africa between gender and declension (deriflection)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tom Güldemann
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 338110259

Understanding gender as noun classification combined with grammatical agreement, the project will investigate gender and its relation to declension in African languages. It starts out from the approach developed by Güldemann (2000 et al.), which uses four analytical core concepts: (i) Agreement class, (ii) Gender (class), (iii) Noun (form) class, and (iv) Declension class. All these concepts are interdependent but nevertheless must be separated strictly in description and analysis. The project combines two main objectives, one typological and one historical-comparative.The goal of the typological project component consists in the further development of a robust typological approach to gender systems on the basis of the above four analytical categories. The focus is on languages that have a complex and/or theoretically interesting number declension profile involving an intricate interplay with gender, notable Kxa, Tuu, Kadu, Cushitic, Niger-Kordofanian, which often leads to a complex interaction and competition between formal and semantic gender assignment. This will also be used to establish a continental typology of gender systems.The goal of the historical-comparative component is the reconstruction of gender systems in Niger-Kordofanian on different genealogical levels. The research in this group is traditionally biased towards a partly deficient approach, originating in Bantu studies, to conflate agreement and noun form classes under the philological concept of noun class. This has resulted in incomplete or even inappropriate reconstructions of gender systems in other families and their partly misleading evaluation in typological gender research. In order to improve the reconstruction of earlier language states, the above cross-linguistically uniform approach, which deals with gender and noun declension separately and ensures the comparability of systems, is applied. The first project phase deals with five geographical pools of Niger-Congo with functioning gender and associated declension systems and a wide geographical and genealogical spread. The historical-comparative analysis together with the consideration of areal distributions and language contact is hoped to also shed light on the still enigmatic history of the largest language family on an African and global level.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants