Syntactic and semantic agreement in Eegimaa (Banjal)
An account of lexical hybrids in an African noun class system
Serge Sagna | University of York
Typological research on agreement systems recognises syntactic and semantic agreement as the two main types of
agreement, with the former considered to be more canonical. An examination of different manifestations of semantic agreement found
in the Gújjolaay Eegimaa [1] 1 noun class (non sex based gender) system is proposed in this paper
from the perspective of Canonical Typology, and the findings are related to the Agreement Hierarchy predictions. The results show
that Eegimaa has hybrid nouns and constructional mismatches which trigger semantically based agreement mismatches, both in gender
and number between controller nouns and certain targets. This paper shows that Eegimaa has two main subtypes of semantic
agreement: human semantic agreement and locative semantic agreement. The data and the analysis proposed here reveal novel results
according to which these two types of semantic agreement behave differently in relation to the Agreement Hierarchy.
Keywords: agreement mismatches, noun class, canonical typology, Jóola, Atlantic, Niger-Congo
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Definition of terms
- 2.1A working definition of agreement
- 2.2Canonical typology
- 3.Summary of the Eegimaa noun class system
- 3.1The noun class system
- 3.2Syntactic agreement in Eegimaa
- 4.Hybrid nouns in Eegimaa
- 4.1Lexical hybrids
- 4.1.1One full lexical hybrid
- 4.1.2Hybrids in the plural only
- 4.2Genre-specific mismatches: Proverbs, songs and generic propositions
- 4.1Lexical hybrids
- 5.Constructional mismatches
- 5.1Locatives in Eegimaa
- 5.2Human collectivity nouns
- 5.3Pure location nouns
- 5.3.1Pure location nouns describing human collectivities
- 5.3.2Pure location nouns with no human referents
- 5.3.3Agreement with nouns denoting containers
- 5.3.4Time location nouns
- 5.4Conjoined noun phrases
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
References
Published online: 18 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.14023.sag
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.14023.sag
References
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Corbett, Greville G.
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