The reference system of Mupun

Abstract Mupun (West Chadic) has a fundamental distinction between reference to the environment of speech and to the anaphora, which is marked through distinct coding means that run throughout the grammatical system in the language. Mupun has one of the richest logophoric systems described so far in the literature in that logophoricity can have the subject, the object, and the addressee in its scope. The logophoric system is a part of the reference to speech environment-anaphoric distinction in the language. Anaphoric reference in Mupun distinguishes between pronouns whose antecedent occurs in the preceding discourse but not in the same clause; pronouns whose antecedents occur in the same clause; and logophoric pronouns whose antecedents occur in the same sentence but not in the same clause. The reference system of Mupun serves as a diagnostic tool for the discovery of syntactic categories in this language. From the point of view of reference, the topicalized phrase does not belong to the same clause as the comment on the phrase.