East Benue-Congo noun classes, with a focus on morphological behavior

Comparative studies of noun class systems in East Benue-Congo languages go back at least as far as the mid-nineteenth century work on comparative Bantu undertaken by Wilhelm Bleek. In the wider Benue-Congo context, the most significant work is de Wolf (1971), which reconstructs a noun class system for Proto-Benue- Congo and remains the most detailed study on the topic available today. This paper summarizes the results of De Wolf and also looks at various morphosyntactic aspects of Benue-Congo noun class systems en route to consideration of the possibilities for reconstruction of abstract features of the noun class system of the proto-language. These include patterns of change in the structure of these systems, the fact that both prefixing and suffixing noun class systems are attested in the family, domains of noun class concord, different series of noun class markers appearing on different morphological hosts, and the issue of how attested classes can be linked to reconstructed classes.