Headless relative clauses and anti-agreement in Kirundi

Anti-agreement effects have been widely documented in the Bantu language family where they occur in the specific context of Class 1 subject extraction. This paper looks at an instance of apparent Bantu AAEs that occur in an even more restricted context; in Kirundi, AAEs arise only in headless relative clauses but not other Class 1 subject extraction constructions. Drawing on novel fieldwork, I argue that the restricted distribution of AAEs in Kirundi is the result of the restricted distribution of overt relative markers. Both only occur in headless relative clauses. I link this correlation to unique properties of headless relative clauses, specifically proposing that such relative clauses are headed by empty nouns which require a relative operator in D. This proposal, in the spirit of Jenks et al. (2017), provides a unifiedaccount of variation in the structure of relative clauses in Kirundi, and the presenceof AAEs, with greater implications for the understanding of relativization and anti-agreement in related Bantu languages.