[Lingtyp] Attestations of adjectives with fixed noun class

[George Lindsay]

Dear linguists,

I am writing to ask if anyone is aware of, and could point me in the direction of, languages where adjectival modifiers have their own fixed noun class assignment that overrides the noun class of the head on agreement targets.

I am currently aware of one language that exhibits this phenomenon, Kafire (Senufo), and have provided some examples below from Nikitina and Silué (2023:122-123) to exemplify the type of phenomenon I am talking about. Note that when the head pɔ̰̄ 'dog' is modified by an adjective, the targets for noun class agreement (the demonstrative pronoun and definite clitic) do not agree with the noun class of pɔ̰̄ 'dog' (CL1), but with the noun class specification that is inherent to the modifying adjectives (i.e. CL2 for gbóló 'big' in (b) and CL3 for bī 'little' in (c)).

Grateful to know if this agreement phenomenon has been attested elsewhere.

Kind regards,

George Lindsay

Examples
Kafire:
a.
wè
pɔ̰̄=w

this.CL1
dog=CL1.DEF

‘this dog’

b.
jè
pɔ̰̄
gbóló=j

this.CL2
dog
big=CL2.DEF.PL

‘these big dogs’

c.
lè
pɔ̰̄
bī=l

this.CL3
dog
little=CL3.DEF

‘these little dogs’

References
Nikitina, Tatiana, and Songfolo Lacina Silué. 2023. “Noun Class Agreement in Kafire (Senufo): A Lexical-Functional Grammar Account.” Journal of Linguistics 59(1):121–48.

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