Gender and person agreement in Cicipu

I, Stuart John McGill, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. The Cicipu language (Kainji, Benue-Congo) of northwest Nigeria has the kind of robust noun class system characteristic of Benue-Congo languages – GENDER agreement is found on a great many agreement targets inside and outside the noun phrase. For a number of these targets, gender agreement is in competition with a separate paradigm, that of PERSON agreement. The dissertation focuses on the distribution of this alternation with respect to subject prefixes, object enclitics, and pronouns, based on a corpus of 12,000 clauses of spoken language. The alternation proves to be complex to describe, involving a constellation of lexical, phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors. In particular, both animacy and topicality are CONDITIONS (Corbett 2006) on agreement. While inanimate or animal participants normally trigger gender agreement, if they ar