Construing experience in the nominal group: The system of thing-type in Niger-Congo languages

Isaac N. Mwinlaaru

Department of English

University of Cape Coast, Ghana

The theory of metafunction within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has greatly contributed to the understanding of language as a mode of construing experience. In SFL accounts on experiential meaning across languages, however, emphasis has been given to systems of the clause, notably the system of transitivity, with little attention paid to systems of units below the clause. Following Matthiessen (1995: 645-711), there has been recent interest in the nominal group (Martin & Shin, 2021; Mwinlaaru, 2021; Wang, 2021; Zhang, 2021; Doran & Bangga, 2022; Fang, 2022). The present study contributes to this growing body of research on the nominal group by examining the system of thing-type (‘nominal class systems’) in the Niger-Congo phylum of African languages, particularly focusing on the Mabia, Kwa and Bantu language families. thing-type can be defined as the grammatical system by which languages taxonomise entities into types of things. Indeed, Niger-Congo languages are noted for their elaborate nominal classificatory systems (Heine, 1982). While studies on nominal class systems in these languages tend to focus largely on morphological categorisation of nouns, the present study uses the notion of ‘trinocular vision’ to examine nominal class systems as meaning making resources for construing experience of the world. The findings show that nominal classes in Niger-Congo languages are organized around two main notions, humanness and diminution. They are also encoded by number affixes attached to the noun serving as Head/Thing in the nominal group, and they are based not only on material considerations but also on social ones. For instance, different affixes are often used to further group [+human] nouns into various kinds of social and ontological classes, extending the sub-system of humanness in delicacy. There are, however, variations across languages in terms of class concord. While some languages (e.g., notably Mabia languages and Bantu languages) require concord between the nominal class of the noun serving as Thing and other elements in the nominal group, other languages (notably Kwa languages) do not show concord. Where agreement exists, agreement targets are typically specific and non-specific determiners, quantifiers, numerals, and anaphoric pronouns. These findings will be related to the ordered typology of systems. The study sheds new light on systemic accounts on thing-type (Matthiessen, 1995) with data from African languages.