Asymmetries in noun class marking: The view from possessive pronoun focus in Eastern Grassfields Bantu

Abstract A considerable number of Grassfields Bantu languages instantiate determiner phrase internal re-ordering for possessive pronoun focus that, in turn, may affect the form of noun class exponents. I describe the phenomenon in the Eastern Grassfields Bantu languages Ngemba, Medumba and Shupamem, and argue that it should be thought of as an instance of anti-agreement effects (see, a. o. , Schneider-Zioga, Patricia. 2007. Anti-agreement, anti-locality and minimality. the syntax of dislocated subjects. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. 25. 403–446. https: //doi. org/10. 1007/s11049-006-9014-5, Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka. 2016. Anti-locality and optimality in Kaqchikel agent focus. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. 34 (2). 429–479. https: //doi. org/10. 1007/s11049-015-9310-z, Baier, Nico. 2018. Anti-agreement. University of California dissertation, The United States of America) within the nominal domain. I adopt Carstens (Carstens, Vicki. 2026. The grammar of gender: Insights from Bantu asymmetries of AGR with conjoined subjects. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. 44 (2). 20. https: //doi. org/10. 1007/s11049-026-09702-x) ’s grammar of gender, and propose an account of the phenomenon using Baier (Baier, Nico. 2018. Anti-agreement. University of California dissertation, The United States of America) ’s theory of anti-agreement – which assumes that information structure features such as focus and topic can trigger impoverishment rules (see also Lahne, Antje. 2009. Where there is fire there is smoke: Local modelling of successive-cyclic movement. Universitat Leipzig dissertation, Leipzig. Ershova, Ksenia. 2024. φ-feature mismatches in Samoan resumptives as postsyntactic impoverishment. In Serova Kutay & Snigaroff Madeline (eds. ), Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society 59 (2023), 87–102. https: //kershova. github. io/ErshovaCLS59ₚroceedings. pdf. Fongang, Tadjo Leonel. 2025b. Topic resumption in Bamileke Ngemba: Animate/inanimate asymmetries and strictly local Impoverishment. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics. 10 (1). https: //doi. org/10. 16995/glossa. 15465. ).