Prominence Mismatches and Differential Object Marking in Bantu

Majority of Bantu languages encode subjects by head-marking and objects by positional licensing. This reflects a point in the historical process whereby positional licensing of objects becomes obligatory due to the loss of inflecctional morphology. What we observe in synchronic grammar is considerable variation both across and within languages in the use of head-marking morphology for objects. This paper examines this variation under the general concept of DIFFERENTIAL OBJECT MARKING (DOM). I show that an Optimality-Theoretic LFG account of DOM in Bantu enables us to provide a unified account of differential marking of objects across typologically diverse languages—realized by case, agreement, or by lexical choice—which is conditioned by the same semantic/pragmatic factors (animacy and definiteness/specificity). The present analysis also illustrates that cross-linguistic variation and language-internal variation (= ‘optionality’) operate within a single typological space made available by the system of universal, violable constraints.