Noun Classes and Agreement in Dawida

Abstract

This article presents an overview of the Dawida noun class system, which consists of 15 classes and 4 subclasses. Each of the 15 main classes is a set of nouns that take the same nominal prefix and have common agreement paradigms. Subclasses trigger the same agreement as the main classes they refer to, but have different nominal prefixes. The opposition between singularity and plurality in Dawida only occurs in the system of noun classes. Among 11 attested class correlations between singular and plural nouns, 9 correlations are the most widespread Bantu number pairings or so-called genders. From a syntactic point of view, two types of agreement exist in the language: (a) agreement of modifiers with the head noun of the noun phrase, and (b) agreement of verb forms with the subject/object noun phrase. Morphologically, the noun prefixes and 5 series of dependent prefixes are distinguished.