Forthcoming Object marking in Lubukusu: At the interface of pragmatics and syntax

Michael Diercks   Justine Mukhwana Sikuku  
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/

Synopsis

Like many languages across the world, Lubukusu possesses an object marker (OM) morpheme on the verb that can serve in a pronominal function, representing the object of the sentence. Lubukusu also has a doubling construction where this OM can co-occur in the same sentence with its coreferential object (clitic-doubling, or OM-doubling).  This volume investigates OM-doubling in Lubukusu, showing that while it is starkly unacceptable in neutral discourse contexts, it is robustly available in a range of discourse/extralinguistic contexts that license different sorts of emphasis. Lubukusu OM-doubling resists a purely pragmatic analysis, however, as a number of its properties are clearly syntactic: for example, emphasized constituents must remain in the verb phrase, and there are familiar locality constraints on which objects undergo Agree operations.  The OM-doubling construction is analyzed in a Minimalist framework within generative syntax, assuming an integration of information structural features into the syntactic derivation.

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Object marking in Lubukusu: At the interface of pragmatics and syntax

Author Biographies

Michael Diercks

Michael Diercks is a Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, USA. His research focuses on the morphosyntax of East African languages. He is part of an ongoing project documenting multiple Luhya languages spoken in Western Kenya, and works on syntactic theory having to do with licensing of noun phrases, agreement, and the intersection of information structure and syntax.

Justine Mukhwana Sikuku

Justine Mukhwana Sikuku is a Senior lecturer in the Department of Literature, Linguistics, Foreign Languages and Film Studies at Moi University. He received his PhD from the University of Nairobi in 2011. He was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University in the fall semester of 2011, HoD, Linguistics and Foreign Languages, Moi University (2013-2018), a visiting scholar at Pomona College, in 2020. His research interests are in syntax and morphology of Bantu and Nilotic languages, and in the interface between language and culture. He has published several papers and articles and attended numerous conferences in different parts of the world.

book cover

Forthcoming

November 9, 2026

LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Open Generative Syntax

Print ISSN

2568-7336
Cite as
Diercks, Michael & Sikuku, Justine Mukhwana. 2026. Object marking in Lubukusu: At the interface of pragmatics and syntax. (Open Generative Syntax). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2026 Michael Diercks, Justine Mukhwana Sikuku (Author)

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.