The Noun-Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo

Wolf, Paul de

doi:10.1515/9783110905311

Cited by 66 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…The following examples of nouns, with the matching Proto-Benue-Congo reconstructions of De Wolf (1971), show that the final syllables of the Hone nouns must be regarded äs stem-final syllables rather than class suffixes, äs they are there even in the reconstructed forms.…”

Section: Evidence From the Peripherymentioning

confidence: 83%

Where have all the noun classes gone? A case study of Jukun

Storch¹

1997

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics

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Jukun is commonly regarded äs a language düster which has lost its noun class prefixes almost completely, to the extent ofbuilding up new Suffixes in some lects like Jukun of Takum (Welmers 1968). This paper aims at showing that there are some languages on the Northern periphery of the old Kororofa kingdom of the Jukun which have preserved various noun class prefixes and a more complex, more conservative morphology in general, so that the present make-up of the more central Jukun lects like Jukun of Wukari and Jukun of Takum can be understood äs the result of a clear and straightforward tendency towards word stem apocope and morphological reduction.

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Section: Evidence From the Peripherymentioning

confidence: 83%

Where have all the noun classes gone? A case study of Jukun

Storch¹

1997

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics

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“…5 This numbering system corresponds as closely as is reasonable to the Bleek/Meinhof Bantu tradition, which was later applied to Benue-Congo (Wolf 1971) and Niger-Congo (Williamson 1989). It is this classification that is adopted in the rest of the article.…”

Section: Noun Class Systemmentioning

confidence: 87%

Word tone and tonal overwriting in Kabiye nouns

Roberts¹

2016

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics

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This paper presents a re-analysis of the tone of Kabiye nouns. It focuses on two tonal phenomena that have apparently not been reported elsewhere in Gur languages: root melodies associating to whole words and tonal overwriting. All singular suffixes are analyzed as being underlyingly toneless and receiving their surface tone by means of the root melody associating to the entire word, as though blind to the morpheme boundary. Association of tones to trimoraic words is dealt with by positing that the OCP is inactive. The non-singular (plural, collective and liquid) suffixes -with one exception -are underlyingly HL. The analysis of these forms distinguishes between non-overwriting suffixes, in which the word level tone is merely the sum of its parts, and overwriting suffixes, in which the tone of the suffix overwrites the final tone(s) of the root melody.

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“…similarity in all their agreement targets, are treated as members of distinct classes (see Sagna 2008, Sagna 2010. This follows the tradition in Niger-Congo languages of assigning singular and plural forms of a noun to different classes (de Wolf 1971, Katamba 2003, J. D. Sapir 1971, Welmers 1973. Table 1 also presents, in class 2, a variety of prefixes which combine with nouns of human denotation to form the plural of class 1.…”

Section: Agreement and Noun Class Inventorymentioning

confidence: 92%