Non-canonical gender in African languages

This chapter investigates interactions between gender and number, and between gender and evaluative morphology in eighty-four African languages. It argues that interactions of gender with other grammatical domains (e.g. number) and/or with domains of derivational morphology (e.g. diminutive/augmentative) represent instances of non-canonical gender. This is based on two assumptions: (1) canonical morphosyntactic features should be maximally independent from each other, and (2) canonical gender should be an inherent lexical property of nouns, not manipulable for semantic or pragmatic purposes. The gender systems of the sampled languages appear to be frequently non-canonical because they are prone to interact with the morphosyntactic encoding of number distinctions and with the formation of diminutive and augmentative nouns. The chapter further outlines some suggestions as to how interactions between gender and other domains of nominal morphology may contribute to assess asymmetries between gender and other functional domains, as well as the complexity of gender systems.