Addressee agreement and clitic raising in Kiunguja Swahili

Abstract I analyze the plural addressee suffix -eni in Kiunguja Swahili as the head of an AddresseeP. -Eni selects vP, out of which the verb raises to host this suffix. Close inspection provides insights into several aspects of Kiunguja syntax. -Eni routinely co-occurs with a second person singular object marker ku- on the verb despite its plural addressee interpretation. I argue that this mismatch is due to doubling of a conjoined object: [yousing & X]. I provide an analysis in terms of clitic raising of the second singular object pronoun onto the verb. The resulting ku- -eni construction is an apparent violation of the general ban on agreement with singular conjuncts, but not an actual one, since the OM turns out not to be agreement. It is a genuine violation of the Coordinate Structure Constraint, however, which I’ve argued is made possible by the relation Agree (-eni, &P). Eni also encodes the features of a plural addressee of an imperative or exhortative (e.g. ‘Let’s go!’ with plural addressee). The facts motivate an analysis of exhortatives in which addressee features are variable and formally distinct from those of the 1st person speaker, modifying Zanuttini et al (2012).