Semantic and morphophonological productivity of Kîîtharaka gender system

Nominal classification systems are characterized by diverse and sometimes complexgender assignment rules that interact in dynamic ways. The specifics of how gender assignmentworks can vary widely from language to language. Nominal classification systems of Bantulanguages in particular have been the subject of long-standing debate. Traditional accounts ofgender assignment are based principally on abstract semantic features which have been found tobe unreliable in at least some present-day Bantu languages. Such analyses, in addition to relyingon arbitrary sets of semantic features, are problematic, since they provide no clear definition ofwhat it means for a particular feature to be productive. Here we follow a more recent approach,using corpus data to evaluate productivity. We compiled a corpus of 2,327 Kîîtharaka nouns,each coded for a set of semantic and morphophonological features. We then used the TolerancePrinciple (Yang, 2016) to measure the predicted productivity of each feature. Our resultsindicate that morphophonological features are highly productive in Kîîtharaka. However, of thetested semantic features, relatively few were predicted to be productive, including Human, andsome evaluative features (Augmentative, Pejorative, Diminutive). The feature Human is infact only productive for a specific subset of nouns, indicating a possible interaction betweenfeatures. We discuss why this might be, and highlight the implications of this approach forKîîtharaka, and for the study of gender assignment in Bantu more broadly.