Conjoint Plural Object Concord in Zulu

This paper focuses on the agreement system in Zulu. In particular, noun class and object concord, which is an agreement marking, are discussed. Zulu is spoken in the Republic of South Africa, and belongs to the Bantu language family. Zulu nouns are generally prefixed by a class marker, which suggests that class prefixes determine which noun class nouns belong to (Poulos and Bosch). Additionally, each class has a correspondent subject concord (SC) and object concord (OC). Both concords are prefixed to verbs to show an agreement with nouns.This paper shows that OCs of singular and plural nouns are fairly simple whereas referring to more than two distinctive nouns is complicated. This kind of complex OCs are referred to as ‘Conjoint Plural Object Concord (CPOC)’ throughout this paper. There are two patterns of CPOC observed in Zulu, which are ba and ku. Nouns with the same humanness can be grouped and referred to with a CPOC.It should be noted that some combinations of nouns do not allow us to make a CPOC. It is when [+human] and [-human] nouns are conjoined, which indicates that there is an animacy constraint. Thus, humanness decides the form of CPOC, and when nouns have different humanness, CPOC is not available. One of the ways to refer to [+human] and [-human] nouns together is to repeat the nouns as they are. Another way is to say the [+human] noun with its OC and repeat the [-human] noun. The third way is to say the [-human] noun with its OC and repeat the [+human] noun. The order of the full noun phrases and simple OC is not constrained by animacy hierarchy.All in all, animacy is a factor that determines the form of CPOC in Zulu language