Abstract
This study presents a comparative morphosyntactic analysis of the article systems of Nembe, a Niger-Congo language spoken in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, and French, a Romance language with a well-documented grammatical gender system. The study investigated the animacy and natural gender structure in the Nembe determiner system and contrasts this with the largely arbitrary and lexically fixed grammatical gender distinctions found in French. It argues that Nembe language encodes a cognitively transparent and semantically motivated hierarchy that privileges human and animate referents directly within morphology, while French language treats grammatical gender as largely arbitrary and not semantically motivated, and relies primarily on conventional grammatical assignment. Drawing on illustrative examples from both languages, this paper demonstrates that Nembe language employs post-nominal articles that are morphologically bound to the noun and function as agreement morphemes rather than as only independent determiners. These enclitic articles encode distinctions such as masculine, feminine and neuter, with a strong alignment between grammatical marking and real-world referential properties such as humanness and animacy. In contrast, French articles are pre-nominal, phonologically independent and obligatorily required, but their gender marking often bears little relationship to natural gender, particularly in the case of inanimate nouns. Beyond structural description, the paper explores the pedagogical implications of these typological differences for the teaching and learning of French in Nembe-speaking contexts. It argues that learners’ prior knowledge of a semantically transparent article system may influence their acquisition of French gender agreement, potentially leading to transfer effects and learning difficulties. The study therefore advocates contrastive, typology-informed instructional strategies that explicitly address differences in determiner position, agreement mechanisms and gender assignment, thereby facilitating more effective second language instruction.
Keywords: Nembe Language, French Articles, Animacy Hierarchy, Natural Vs Grammatical Gender, Contrastive Linguistics