Gender, Number and Person in Bantu Languages

Extract

One of the more obvious facts about the occurrence of grammatical concord in a language is the possibility of classifying the words -that operate the concord. The simplest kind of classification is one in which a class consists of all those words which require or display a particular set of agreements. In this way a definite number of classes is established, but there is no indication of any relationship between the classes, indeed the nature of such relationships, if any, is a subject for further investigation. As is widely known, in Bantu languages grammatical concord is operated by means of prefix agreement, a fact which is moreover one of the criteria used to determine whether or not a given language is to be accepted as Bantu. For this reason it is possible to examine on a general basis certain features of the class system of these languages that is involved in the use of concord.