Reconciling animacy and noun class in Bantu

This squib investigates the relationship between animacy and the noun class system of Bantu languages. Combining facts from various animacy-sensitive phenomena across the family, including anti-agreement, animacy override, and agreement resolution under conjunction, we argue that the featural properties of Bantu nouns directly encode a prominence hierarchy. We show that all nouns, regardless of the noun class expressed on the surface, are underlyingly specified for a CORE NOUN CLASS, which encodes whether a noun is a human (class 1/2), non-human animate (class 9/10), or inanimate (class 7/8). We propose that core noun class is morphologically encoded by the final vowel found on many Bantu nouns, and syntactically encoded by the nominal categorizing head n using the features [±Animate] and [±Human]. We further argue that core noun class can be obscured by the stacking of multiple n’s within the nominal spine, creating a mismatch between the morphophonological expression of class within a noun versus the expression in agreement. We discuss the consequences of this proposal for the wider theory of Bantu noun class and theories of agreement.