Nominal number in cushitic

Abstract

Cushitic languages have a number of interesting properties in the category of number. None of these are valid for all Cushitic languages. Number is not obligatorily expressed in various Cushitic languages which have a general number form that is unspecified for number. Nonetheless morphological number marking in the noun is often complex in two ways: there are many competing lexically determined morphological markers and many different constellations of derived singular and derived plurals. Number and gender show complex interactions in Cushitic. Number formatives impose gender and hence different gender values for different number forms in the same lexeme, sometimes apparent gender polarity (singular and plural having opposite values for gender). A theoretically challenging property of some languages is that that there is a third gender, here labelled ‘plural’ because it takes the agreement morphology of 3pl pronouns.