Noun Class “Concord” as Communication
Ellen Contini-Morava
Professor Emerita, University of Virginia
This presentation provides a critique of the assumptions that underlie the traditional concept of “agreement/concord”, seen as a situation in which the grammatical form of one element in a sentence (the "target”, in the terminology of Corbett 1991; 2006) is regarded as dependent on morphosyntactic or semantic features of another element (the "controller" or “trigger”). The term “concordial agreement” is often used to refer to the marking of (grammatical) “gender” or “noun class”, i.e. to the relationship between a noun and classificatory markers elsewhere in the sentence. Focusing on the marking of noun classification in Swahili with some reference to Italian gender (Davis 2022; updated this volume), I provide several examples that are problematic for the traditional approach to agreement, e.g. cases where a “controller” is associated with different classification markers, a “controller” that is not present in the sentence, and a “controller” that is an expression not classifiable as a noun. I present an alternative perspective that treats Swahili classification markers as signals with meanings. This approach can handle both examples that conform to traditional notions of “concord” and ones that do not.
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