Subject Clitics: New Evidence from Old Nubian

Abstract

This article treats a set of subject cross-referencing morphemes in the medieval Nilo-Saharan language Old Nubian, traditionally called “personal endings.” Based on an analysis of their syntactic distribution and morphology, I argue that this set can be best described as a set of subject clitics, originally deriving from phonologically reduced pronominals. This set of subject clitics interacts with both topic and focus makers in the clause. Finally, by inspecting the historical development of Old Nubian subject clitics into full-fledged agreement suffixes modern Nile Nubian languages Nobiin and Mattokki (Kenzi) I argue that a purely syntactical approach to this development is impracticable, but that any morpho-phonological approach should be able to account for the diachronic data.

Keywords

• Nilo-Saharan languages
• Old Nubian
• clitics
• agreement
• typology