The encoding of subjects and objects in Jumjum, a Nilotic OV language

This article shows that in Jumjum, a little-described language belonging to the Southern Burun subbranch of Western Nilotic, subjects and objects are obligatorily cross-referenced in the verb. Only definite patients are coded as objects, while indefinite patients are coded as non-core arguments of antipassive verbs. Jumjum and its sister language Mabaan are morphosyntactically unique among the Western Nilotic languages in three respects. Firstly, the object of a transitive verb always precedes the verb (OV order). Secondly, subjects and objects are always expressed by the inflection of the verb, which thus cross-references subject and object noun phrases. And thirdly, some subject suffixes are deleted before some object suffixes, which gives rise to many cases of segmentally homonymous forms, but these forms are kept phonologically distinct by their tone patterns. The article documents these features by also taking into account the effect of derived verb stems and of tense inflection on the expression of cross-reference. To some extent, the derivational morphemes are expressed by suffixation, but in addition, root-internal alternations play a major role, including alternations in vowel quality, vowel length, and the root-final consonant.