In chapter 10 ‘Subject Focus in West African Languages’, Ines Fiedler, Katharina Hartmann, Brigitte Reineke, Anne Schwarz, and Malte Zimmermann investigate the peculiarities of subject focus marking in three West African language groups. After a discussion of various strategies of focus realization, it is shown that most languages in the sample exhibit a subject/non‐subject asymmetry with respect to focus marking: While focus on non‐subjects can often go unmarked, subject focus must always be marked. The grammatical ways of subject focus marking vary widely across the languages under discussion. Strategies used include syntactic, morphological and prosodic focus marking, as well as the reorganization of the entire clause into a thetic statement. It is argued that the special status of focused subjects follows from the fact that the default interpretation of subjects is a topic interpretation. In order to avoid this default reading, a focused subject must be marked as such.

Recent research looks increasingly at languages with more than one system of nominal classification and first systematic typological assessments of so-called “concurrent noun classification” exist with a focus on cases involving classifiers and gender. We elaborate on this work by dealing with Niger-Congo languages that have restructured their inherited noun classification in a particular way. The inherited system entailing a strong parallelism between agreement-based gender and affix-based noun inflections shifted toward one where the gender system is reduced to an animacy-based opposition while nominal inflection maintains a considerable amount of original complexity with semantic criteria beyond those of the innovative gender distinction. While the phenomenon as such is not a new discovery, its typological relevance has gone unrecognized so far. We argue that such cases of restructured gender systems in Niger-Congo prima facie suggest themselves as candidates for a new type of concurrent noun classification, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. We present a detailed description of the phenomenon in the Guang language Gonja and determine whether or how it can be integrated in the available typology. We also survey its wider distribution and discuss some recurrent historical aspects of its emergence in the family.

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We give an overview of current research questions pursued in connection with an ongoing project on nominal classification systems in Africa, with a particular focus on Niger-Congo. We first introduce our cross-linguistically applicable methodological approach which provides new insights into the design of a range of gender systems on the continent. We then apply these ideas to the “noun class” systems of Niger-Congo. We focus on non-canonical phenomena of poorly known languages, which attest to an unexpected systemic diversity beyond the well-known Bantu type and promise to change the synchronic and diachronic perspective on the gender systems of this family.

This paper describes the gender system of the Ubangi language Mba, which can be characterized by the co-existence of two different classification systems. The ‘formal agreement’ system is tightly bound with the nominal deriflection system, while the ‘semantic agreement’ system, by contrast, emanates from a tripartite distinction in the language made between masculine humans, other animates, and inanimates. Whereas formal agreement is manifested on different elements that modify the head noun, the semantic agreement system operates in the pronominal domain, mostly outside the noun phrase.