The Status of Subject and Object Pronominal Elements in Lukunosh Mortlockese

Abstract

Subject and object pronominal elements go by a variety of names in the literature of Oceanic languages. Few authors, however, clarify the morphophonological and morphosyntactic status of such elements. This paper investigates the status of subject markers and object markers in the Lukunosh dialect of Mortlockese, a minority language spoken in the Federated States of Micronesia. Through the application of morphophonological and morphosyntactic tests established in the literature, I conclude that: (1) subject markers are proclitics that have ambiguous interpretation as either anaphoric agreement (arguments) or grammatical agreement, and (2) object markers are suffixes that show a split: (a) the third-person singular object marker behaves like a general transitivity marker when there is an overt object, and (b) both the third-person singular object marker and the other non-third-person singular object markers behave like anaphoric agreement when there is no overt object.