Asymmetries in noun class marking: The view from possessive pronoun focus in Eastern Grassfields Bantu

Abstract A considerable number of Grassfields Bantu languages instantiate determiner phrase internal re-ordering for possessive pronoun focus that, in turn, may affect the form of noun class exponents. I describe the phenomenon in the Eastern Grassfields Bantu languages Ngemba, Medumba and Shupamem, and argue that it should be thought of as an instance of anti-agreement effects (see, a.o., Schneider-Zioga, Patricia. 2007. Anti-agreement, anti-locality and minimality. the syntax of dislocated subjects. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory . 25. 403–446. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-006-9014-5 , Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka. 2016. Anti-locality and optimality in Kaqchikel agent focus. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory . 34(2). 429–479. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9310-z , Baier, Nico. 2018. Anti-agreement . University of California dissertation, The United States of America) within the nominal domain. I adopt Carstens (Carstens, Vicki. 2026. The grammar of gender: Insights from Bantu asymmetries of AGR with conjoined subjects. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory . 44(2). 20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-026-09702-x )’s grammar of gender, and propose an account of the phenomenon using Baier (Baier, Nico. 2018. Anti-agreement. University of California dissertation, The United States of America)’s theory of anti-agreement – which assumes that information structure features such as [ focus ] and [ topic ] can trigger impoverishment rules (see also Lahne, Antje. 2009. Where there is fire there is smoke: Local modelling of successive-cyclic movement . Universitat Leipzig dissertation, Leipzig. Ershova, Ksenia. 2024. φ-feature mismatches in Samoan resumptives as postsyntactic impoverishment. In Serova Kutay & Snigaroff Madeline (eds.), Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society 59 (2023), 87–102. https://kershova.github.io/Ershova_CLS59_proceedings.pdf . Fongang, Tadjo Leonel. 2025b. Topic resumption in Bamileke Ngemba: Animate/inanimate asymmetries and strictly local Impoverishment. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics . 10(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.15465 .).