Person and number marking in Kpelle: On the typology of person–number agreement.

It is a well-known fact that African languages have complicated noun class agreement systems, i.e. Bantu and many other Niger-Congo languages, but there is no noun class agreement in Mande languages. However, this does not mean that Mande languages do not have any agreement at all. The goal of the article is to show that some Mande languages, such as Kpelle (< South-Western Mande), have agreement in person and number. I also show that in Kpelle typologically common distributive properties of person-number markers form non-trivial confi gurations of person and number agreement which are not identical in different syntactic domains.