Niger-Congo "noun classes'" conflate gender with deriflection

This paper reviews the treatment of gender systems in Niger-Congo languages. Our
discussion is based on a consistent methodological approach, to be presented in §1,
which employs four analytical concepts, namely agreement class, gender, nominal
form class, and deriflection and which, as we argue, are applicable within Niger-
Congo and beyond. Due to the strong bias toward the reconstruction of Bantu and
wider Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo gender systems tend to be analyzed by means of
a philologically biased and partly inadequate approach that is outlined in §2. This
framework assumes in particular a consistent alliterative one-to-one mapping of
agreement and nominal form classes conflated under the philological concept of
“noun class”. One result of this is that gender systems are recurrently deduced
merely from the number-mapping of nominal form classes in the nominal deri-
flection system rather than from the agreement behavior of noun lexemes. We
show, however, that gender and deriflection systems are in principle different, il-
lustrating this in §3 with data from such Niger-Congo subgroups as Potou-Akanic
and Ghana-Togo-Mountain. Our conclusions given in §4 are not only relevant for
the historical-comparative and typological assessment of Niger-Congo systems but
also for the general approach to grammatical gender.