| dc.description.abstract | Bantu languages are known for their agglutinative nature and a complex verbal morphology. ln this case, a single verbal word has several affixes •including the subject and object markers hereafter SM and OM respectively. There is an ongoing debate on the nature and status of the SMs and OM.s in Bantu. These markers have been analysed as agreement markers in some languages while in others, they are incorporated pronominals. Still in some other languages they have been analysed as clitics. The major question is whether these markers should be analysed as agreement markers, incorporated pronominals or clitics in EkeGusii. The focus of this study is on the unexplained syntactic and semantic properties of SMs and OMs in EkeGusii. The purpose of the study is to provide a syntactic and semantic description of the nature of these markers in EkeGusii to help characterise them. The objectives of the study are; First, to describe the morphological properties of EkeGusii SMs and OMs. Second, to explain the syntactic properties of EkeGusii SMs and OMs; Third, to determine the syntactic operations that determine the occurrence of these markers in EkeGusii; Fourth, to analyse the semantic properties of the SMs and OMs and finally to ascertain the status of these markers in EkeGusii. The study used Baker's (1988) Incorporation Theory. Descriptive aud analytical research designs were employed. The target population was all the 2,215 basic verbal words in the First Edition of EkeGusii Dictionary (2013 ). In addition, sentences in which the verbs appear were generated by the researcher as a native speaker of EkeGusii. A total of seventy-five verbal words were purposively sampled to study the patterns taken by SMs and OMs in sentences. The data was analysed descriptively by grouping it into morphological properties, syntactic properties, syntactic operations and the status of these markers. Findings reveal that the SM is an agreement marker when the lexical subject Determiner Phrase (DP) co-occurs with the SM and an incorporated pronoun in null subject constructions. The SM is thus both an agreeement marker and an incorporated pronominal. The OM is an incorporated pronoun because the doubling of the OM and the corresponding lexical DP is grammatically disallowed in EkeGusii. In analysing the status of SMs and OMs, the morphological and syntactic evidence provided shows that these markers are more of affixes than clitics in this language. It is hoped that the findings of this study will be of importance to the description of EkeGusii language, theoretical linguistics and language scholars in general. | en_US |