Types of semantic agreement in the Bantu languages

International audience This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of agreement alternatives and their mapping on the agreement hierarchy by providing a typology and morphosyntactic analysis of semantic agreement in the Bantu languages. Four types of obligatory semantic agreement will be distinguished, viz. animate agreement, basic level term agreement, evaluative agreement and locative agreement, next to a number of optional types, such as superclassing and honorific agreement. I will show that these types are not only in competition with formal agreement, but potentially also with each other, as illustrated in (1).(1)Swahili (Gregersen 1967: 19)a.Yu-leki-pofu,ni-li-mw-on-a1-DEM7-blind1SG-PST-OP1-see-FV‘That blind man, I saw him.’b.Ki-leki-pofu,ni-li-ki-on-a7-DEM7-blind1SG-PST-OP7-see-FV‘That tiny blind man, I saw him.’In (1a) the class 7 noun kipofu ‘blind person’ triggers animate agreement of class 1 on the demonstrative and the verb. In (1b) the controller noun is a derived diminutive. However, since diminutive derivation is achieved by moving nouns to class 7, and class 7 is also the lexical noun class of kipofu, the diminutive derivation is formally marked by the cancellation of animate agreement. This shows, among other things, that if animate and evaluative agreement are in competition with each other, the latter wins, at least within the domain of the simple clause. It is currently not yet clear how the different types of semantic agreement map onto the agreement hierarchy, or how they interact with the hierarchy of agreement sources recently argued for by Corbett (2023: 7) and shown in (2). I will provide an overview of the theoretical possibilities, so that a set of clear hypotheses can be tested in future corpus studies.(2)specification>morphosyntactic>lexical>complex nominal>extraneousof cellspecificationsemanticsconstructionsourceReferencesCorbett, Greville G. 2023. The Agreement Hierarchy and (generalized) semantic agreement. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8(1). doi.org, Edgar Alstrup. 1967. Prefix and pronoun in Bantu (Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics 21). Baltimore: Waverly Press.Abbreviations1, 2, 3noun classesDEMdemonstrativeFVFinal vowel (a suffix contributing to the TAMP specification of the verb)PSTPastSGSingularOPObject prefix