Lecture | This Time For Africa! series
Tsuvadi Gender: A mixed form- and semantic-based system
- Date
- Friday 27 September 2024
- Time
- Serie
- This Time for Africa! series
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.18
Abstract
Tsuvadi is a Kainji language of the Benue-Congo language family spoken in Niger state, Nigeria. Although it is one of the more sizeable language groups in its area, it has received comparatively less documentation. Using terminology laid out by Guldemann & Fiedler (2019) and Corbett (1991), I examine Tsuvadi to ascertain how gender works in the language. I find that Guldemann & Fiedler (2019)'s distinction between nominal form and agreement class is helpful to distinguish Tsuvadi’s many morphologically distinct nominal prefixes and agreement patterns. Following Corbett’s terminology, Tsuvadi displays a mixed gender system, where some genders are form-based, while others are semantic-based, particularly in plural forms. Certain genders have also become more productive than others. I also find that some genders serve secondary grammatical functions.