Nominal number and gender in Kufo: A description of its derivational and inflectional systems

Abstract

Kufo is a Kadu language traditionally spoken in the Nuba Mountains in Sudan of which the broader affiliations remain unclear. Due to ongoing conflict in the Nuba Mountains, there has been limited descriptive work done on languages of the region. This thesis uses data gathered through elicitation sessions with a diasporic Kufo speaker located in Australia to analyse the inflectional and derivational systems of nominal number and gender in the language. The study finds that Kufo nouns display tripartite numerative marking, using a combination of singulative, plurative, and equipollent number affixes. It also finds that Kufo exhibits a four-gender system of masculine, feminine, neuter I, and neuter II gender. Nouns trigger gender agreement in their base form when a base form is able to appear independently and in their singular form when a base form cannot appear independently. This thesis shows that Kufo numerative marking and gender are parallel systems of nominal classification. Nouns are being grouped on separate semantic criteria between the two categories. As the first substantive grammatical description of Kufo, this thesis provides data that can be referred to when trying to determine the broader affiliations and history of the Kadu languages, as well as contributing to the typology of nominal number and gender through describing the complex and interacting system Kufo displays.