The Discourse Function of Object Marking in Swahili

1. Introduction The Swahili object marker (OM) is a verbal prefix that agrees with an object of the verb. In Swahili there is no semantic or lexical class of objects for which object marking is obligatory, nor is there any class for which it is impossible. The numerous earlier studies of the object marker have discovered no hard and fast rules for its distribution. Its usage has been found to correlate with a number of factors , which we can divide into semantically/grammatically oriented factors, especially animacy (Wald 1979, Hyman and Duranti 1982, Keach 1995), and discourse-oriented factors such as topichood, specificity or " salience " (Givon 1976, Hyman and Duranti 1982, Allan 1983). But such correlations are invariably tendencies, not categorical facts. Colloquially speaking, then, use of the Swahili OM is " optional ". But such a characterization must be forever suspect: are we really observing unpredictable variation, or are we simply failing to take into account the right variable, or variables , that control the use of the OM? Until and unless we can have an understanding of the role of genuine optionality in language, we can only hope to settle the question by identifying a category (or several categories), grammatical or discourse-oriented, that the OM can be said to consistently denote. Our study of the Swahili OM is undertaken in this spirit. We base our analysis on a corpus study of written Swahili texts selected from the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili. The extent of variability found in the use of the OM, and the fact that intuitions about when to object mark an NP are highly variable across speakers, led us to believe that the conditions determining the use of the OM must be pragmatic in nature. As we show in section 4.1, Prince's (1992) notion of Hearer Status is successful in defining conditions under which the OM is not used; but the converse does not hold, and the OM is unaccountably absent in many cases that meet the conditions we have identified. The relationship of animacy to object marking can then be considered an indirect effect of other factors that tend to correlate with animacy, such as salience in discourse. The optionality of the OM also calls into question its typological status: is the Swahili OM an inflectional morpheme, or a separate, cliticized element? Morphologically , it appears between the verb root and the tense morpheme, …