Notes on Mubi syntax

Looking over Jungraithmayr's Mubi grammar again recently, I think I managed to make sense of the subject paradigms. Presumably all this was clear to Jungraithmayr, but it certainly wasn't clear to me, nor was it mapped to cross-linguistic typological categories; it may therefore be useful to comment. At first sight, Mubi looks like its basic order is SVOX, as in sentences like: màb-ínyúbùtrúm-jíásìrèebí-jí grandmother-1SgGencarry_on_back.PFVdaughter-3FSgGenLOCrib-3FSgGen My grandmother carries her daughter on her side. (Jungraithmayr 2013:153) However, the reality is a little more complicated. Basically: Mubi syntax has what I suppose is a focus slot immediately before the verb, which can be filled by a noun phrase or by a short pronoun ("pronom personnel sujet préposé"). The syntactic role of an element in this slot is determined not by its position alone, but crucially also by what immediately follows the verb stem: If the verb has no pronominal suffixes, the preverbal…