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Class Marking in Emai examines the retention, reduction, and transformation of inflectional resources pertaining to noun class in Emai, an Edoid language of south-central Nigeria. Ronald P. Schaefer and Francis O. Egbokhare demonstrate that in contrast to its Bantu relations, Emai retains form class prefixes on a relatively small group of nouns that distribute across eleven declension sets. Prefix addition rather than prefix alternation arises when ideophonic adverbials become syntactically displaced due to information structure and when Emai borrows lexical items from other languages. Reduction is evident in two primary domains: agreement class or gender and prefixes that alternate to express form class and grammatical number. As for transformation, it characterizes tonal, nominal and pronominal domains. Putting Emai and its noun class system into a broader cultural and archaeological context of historical language change, this book explores what it means to be a Benue Congo language with a reduced inflectional system.
Ronald P. Schaefer is professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.Francis O. Egbokhare is professor in the Department of Linguistics and African Languages at the University of Ibadan.
Chapter One: Emai, Edoid, Benue CongoChapter Two: Class Marking in Benue CongoChapter Three: Class Marking in EdoidChapter Four: Class Marking in EmaiChapter Five: Agreement Marking in EmaiChapter Six: Class Marking on Emai PronounsChapter Seven: Nominalization of Emai Verb Stems Chapter Eight: Class Marking on Emai CompoundsChapter Nine: Ideophone Class Marking and Contact in EmaiChapter Ten: Retention, Reduction and Transformation
Class marking in Emai is, and will remain, an invaluable resource on the components and processes of structural reduction in noun class systems for a long time.
