On the Status of Object Markers in Bantu languages

Much of this literature has concentrated on chosing between one of two analyses: either the OM is a pure agreement marker, analogous to subject markers/agreement in Bantu and other languages, or it is a cliticized pronoun that counts as the true object of the verb even though it appears on the verb on the surface. On the latter analysis, the overt NP in (1c) is not the true grammatical object of the clause, but rather some kind of dislocated adjunct, while the OM is the true object in (1c) as it is presumably in (1b). Bresnan and Mchombo themselves use various diagnostics to argue in favor of the cliticized pronoun analysis (they call it an incorporated pronoun), and their conclusion seems to carry over to many other Bantu languages—for example, Lubukusu, Kinande, and Zulu. But there are a great many Bantu languages, and there is substantial diversity among them— including diversity in the behavior of OMs. Hence it is quite unlikely that “one size fits all” in this respect. In contrast, Riedel (2009) argues that in the superficially similar paradigm in Sambaa shown in (2), the OM -muis best understood as being a realization of object agreement. 2