The emergence of an alternative set of prefixes in the class inflection of adnominals and pronouns in Jóola Fóoñi (Atlantic)

Abstract

In this article, we describe and analyze a set of alternative forms of class prefixes found in the inflection of adnominals and pronouns that have never been mentioned so far in the literature on Jóola Fóoñi. This alternative form of class prefixes differs from the standard form by the presence of a vowel a. We argue that the existence of the Ca-variant of the class prefixes of adnominals and pronouns is not related to the fact that some nouns have a Ca prefix, and results rather from the reanalysis of the prefixal sequence that characterizes participles as an alternative set of class prefixes whose use tends to be extended to other types of noun modifiers.