The Status of Subject and Object Markers in Pakin Lukunosh Mortlockese

Abstract

Subject and object markers go by a variety of names in the literature on Oceanic languages. Few authors, however, clarify the morphophonological and morpho-syntactic status of such elements. This paper investigates the status of subject and object markers in the Pakin geolect of 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 (i) subject markers are proclitics that have ambiguous interpretation as either anaphoric agreement (arguments) or grammatical agreement, and (ii) object markers are suffixes that show a split: (a) the third person singular object suffix behaves like a general transitivity marker when there is an overt object, and (b) both the third person singular object suffix and the other nonthird person singular object suffixes behave like anaphoric agreement when there is no overt object.