[Lingtyp] Attestations of adjectives with fixed noun class

[Larry M Hyman]

Hi - There are several Bantu "Zone A" languages in Cameroon that do exactly
this, the best known being Basaá. Here is an example from the attached
article. As you can see, there is what Africanists call an "associative" or
"connective" morpheme, which is also used in genitives (possessives) and
elsewhere. Hope useful. Best, Larry

[image: image.png]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2025 at 4:08 PM George Lindsay via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> 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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-- 
Larry M. Hyman, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School
& Director, France-Berkeley Fund, University of California, Berkeley
https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman
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