Numeral classifiers in the Benue Congo languages of Africa (NuClaBA)

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The project aims at a comprehensive study of numeral classifier systems (NuCls) in the Benue-Congo languages of Cameroon and Nigeria, in order to improve the rudimentary documentation of the phenomenon in Africa and to advance its general understanding in a broader typological and diachronic perspective. More specifically, this study addresses four basic desiderata: (a) provide fine-grained descriptive case studies of NuCls in two distinct subgroups of Benue-Congo (Tivoid and Eastern Grassfields Bamileke), (b) survey the distribution of NuCls beyond (the Tivoid and Bamileke subgroups) in a wider range of Benue-Congo languages, (c) generate robust historical hypotheses about the emergence and the semantic and morphosyntactic development of NuCls within Benue-Congo, (d) fertilize the general typological debate on NuCls which is currently still blemished by an overall lack of both substantial data from and typologically informed analyses of African NuCls. Since most Benue-Congo NuCls present incipient stages of development, they provide an exceptionally fertile ground for gaining insights into their paths of grammaticalisation with respect to the syntactic sources of classifier constructions as well as the lexical sources of the numeral classifier items themselves and their underlying cognitive motivations. Low level reconstructions of numeral classifiers of Proto-Tivoid and Proto-Bamileke will allow to disentangle genetic inheritance from borrowing and calquing and thus generate hypotheses about the contact-induced areal diffusion of numeral classifiers systems in the multilingual Nigerian-Cameroonian borderlands. In a broader historical perspective, the project will finally provide preliminary answers to the fundamental puzzle of why Benue-Congo languages tend to develop numeral classifier systems on top of the pre-existing fully fledged noun class system of the Bantoid type, contradicting a generally held view that numeral classifier systems in Niger-Congo rather compensate for the decline and loss of a prior noun class system.The following results are envisaged for the first phase of the project: in-depth descriptive studies of the numeral classifier systems of two Benue-Congo languages from different branches, i.e. Ugare (Tivoid, Nigeria) and Ngəmba (Eastern Grassfields Bantu), draft sketches of numeral classifier systems of at least two other Tivoid and Bamileke varieties, a first draft of a comparative study on their emergence and development and preliminary draft sketches of numeral classifier systems in other Nigerian and Cameroonian Benue-Congo languages.