Obolo Subject Markers

Abstract

Subject markers are ubiquitous in Obolo morphology. The ubiquitousness of subject markers in Obolo morphology calls for a linguistic analysis. This study aims to find out the status of Obolo subject markers. This study examines the morphological forms of Obolo subject markers, the distribution of subject markers and provides a morpho-syntactic analysis of subject markers in sentences. The data for this study were collected from native speakers of the language to corroborate the introspective knowledge of the researcher. This study is mainly descriptive. The descriptive method of morpheme-to-morpheme glossing in Linguistics is used to analyse the data
used in this study. The study revealed that subject markers are morphologically conditioned. A morphosyntactic analysis of these subject markers shows that these subject markers can occur with the emphatic forms of personal pronouns or proper nouns. The morphosyntactic analysis also shows that subject markers can retrieve the phi features of dropped subjects. The possibility of dropped subjects makes Obolo a null subject language. The major thrust of this study is the reanalysis of subject markers as clitics against affixes.