Class Marking in Emai: Retention, Reduction, and Transformation of Inflectional Resources

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.