The nanosyntax of Nguni noun class prefixes and concords

This article shows that once it is accepted that a single morpheme can lexicalize a “span” of heads rather than a single head, it becomes possible to establish the complex structures underlying noun class prefixes and agreement markers in Nguni (Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele and Swati) in a mechanical way, based on the distributional properties of the morphemes involved. These structures together with general principles of lexicalization turn out to make an accurate prediction about the syncretism patterns observed among the different types of agreement markers (concords), and we are also led to conclude that the size of nominal projections must be a locus of parametric variation, by comparing Nguni to other Southern Bamtu languages.