title: Accounting for morphosyntactic variation in the nominal domain: a quantitative and experimental investigation of nominal classification and related phenomena in Kîîtharaka
Creators: name: Kanampiu, Patrick Njue
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Bantu languages
subject: Kîîtharaka
subject: semantically abstract noun class systems
subject: nominal gender-number morphology
subject: morphemes
subject: cross-linguistic universals
subject: cognitive biases
subject: rules of noun class assignment
subject: morphophonological assignment rules
subject: artificial language learning
subject: noun class assignment
subject: Human or Non-human nouns
subject: nominal word order

description: This dissertation investigates the morphosyntactic variation in the nominal domain in Kîîtharaka language (Bantu, E54). The main focus is the variation in agreement classes and gender, as (typically) influenced by dynamic gender assignment rules. However, the dissertation also touches on related phenomena including representations of gender and number morphology and nominal word order. There is a rich tradition of research on the nominal domain in linguistics, from theories of abstract hierarchical structure to experiments on the acquisition of noun classes and agreement. In the latter case, it has been shown that nominal agreement often relies on an intricate interaction between two main factors–meaning (semantics), and the form (morphophonology) of the noun. One of the main goals of this dissertation is to establish how gender/noun classes vary as a function of the gender assignment rules in Kîîtharaka, with the goal of achieving a more empirically grounded characterization of the nominal classification system in this language. The first three chapters seek to answer three questions: (i) which semantic and morphophonological features or cues might we predict to be productive for gender assignment in Kîîtharaka based on corpus data, (ii) do Kîîtharaka speakers indeed consistently use these cues to classify novel nouns, and (iii) do speakers use semantic or morphophonological cues more robustly when both are available. Chapter 2 comprises a corpus-based study in which a novel corpus of 2,327 Kîîtharaka nouns was compiled, with each noun coded for a set of semantic and morphophonological features. The Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2016) was used to measure the predicted productivity of each feature. The results indicate that morphophonological features are predicted to be highly productive in Kîîtharaka. However, among the tested semantic features, only a few were predicted to be productive, specifically Human, Tree, and some evaluative features (Augmentative, Pejorative, Diminutive). Interestingly, the feature Human is only productive for a specific subset of nouns, suggesting a possible interaction between features. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the underlying reasons for these results and their implications for Kîîtharaka, as well as for the broader study of gender assignment in Bantu languages. In Chapter 3, we address the empirical question of whether these features are indeed used by Kîîtharaka speakers productively. To address this, we conducted two behavioral (wug-task-style) experiments to ascertain the psychological reality of a series of semantic and morphophonological features respectively. The experiments test whether participants are sensitive to semantic and morphophonological cues in isolation when classifying novel Kîîtharaka nouns. The results indicate that speakers are sensitive to two inherent semantic features, Human and Fruit, as well as evaluative features like Augmentative, Pejorative, and Diminutive. Conversely, they show robust sensitivity to all tested morphophonological features when classifying novel nouns. These findings suggest that semantic features are generally less productive than morphophonological features in the Kîîtharaka nominal classification system. However, given that morphophonology is productive in the same classes where semantics is productive, there is an empirical question regarding which cues speakers use more reliably when both are present. In Chapter 4, therefore, we investigate the relative importance of semantics and morphophonology as cues to nominal classification in the language. In this experiment, participants were shown novel nouns with target nominal morphology, along with corresponding images, and were asked to provide a missing agreement prefix on a dependent word. The results indicate that speakers’ use of semantic and morphophonological cues differ depending on whether a noun is human or non-human. Participants tended to choose semantic assignment for human nouns and morphophonological cues for non-human nouns. We argue that this differential choice of assignment cue may stem from the general importance of human-ness (or animacy) across cognition. Kîîtharaka speakers may find human nouns conceptually more salient than non-human ones, reflecting a broader cognitive bias in forming linguistic categories. Conversely, morphophonology is more reliable for nonhuman nouns, possibly because the semantic assignment rules for these nouns are less grounded in core categorization and are generally less reliable. Chapters 5 and 6, address two additional aspects of variation in the nominal domain—the representation of nominal modifier order and gender-number order—aiming to illustrate what Kîîtharaka can reveal about these phenomena more generally. Chapter 5 investigates underlying constraints on morpheme ordering in the context of gender and number marking. The study compares English, Italian, and Kîîtharaka speakers, who have different L1 experiences with gender morphology, to determine if there are biases in the ordering of these morphemes. The results indicate a bias towards placing the gender morpheme closest to the noun, providing empirical support for certain theories of gender morphosyntax and suggesting that cognitive biases influence morpheme ordering across languages. In Chapter 6, a similar investigation is conducted on the representation of nominal modifier order. The study examines whether Kîîtharaka speakers, whose language follows a unique word order (N&gt;DEM&gt;ADJ, with the adjective furthest from the noun), exhibit similar (underlying) cognitive preferences to English speakers, where the adjective is closest to the noun. Data is collected from monolingual Kîîtharaka speakers with little to no exposure to English. The findings show that Kîîtharaka speakers’ word order preferences mirror those of English speakers, supporting the hypothesis that universal cognitive representation plays a role in shaping word order. Overall, this dissertation concludes that through a comprehensive empirical investigation incorporating quantitative data analyses and behavioural experiments, the complexities associated with various morphosyntactic phenomena can be demystified, not only in Bantu, but in other languages more generally.