Description
What cognitive or communicative functions are played by noun classification and grammatical agreement in language? A noun class is like a "grammatical gender" in languages like Spanish or German: every noun in the language is assigned to a class, and words like adjectives, possessives, and verbs have to "agree with" the class of the noun they refer to. Except that Bantu languages, such as Swahili, have 10-20 classes instead of 2 or 3, and sex/gender plays no role in the classification system. What principles lie behind the classification of nouns in Swahili? Why are kidiri (squirrel), kitovu (bellybutton), and kichelema (over-watery potatoes) in the same class? Another question is how the grammatical agreement system works: can it be manipulated to express different perspectives on the person or thing being referred to? Why do kinship terms have different agreement from other human beings? This work bears on general questions about the relation between language, categorization, culture, and cognition.
