Discourse prominence, communicative goal and differential object marking in Bodo

This paper provides a comprehensive description of differential object marking (DOM) in Bodo [bɔɾɔ] (ISO 639–3: brx), a Bodo-Koch language of the Tibeto-Burman language group, spoken largely in the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) of Assam, India. Some object NPs in Bodo are obligatorily case marked, while others are variably case marked. Object marking can be associated with various referential and discourse properties of the object NPs, such as definiteness, specificity, human reference, newsworthiness, topicality, contrast, and so on, depending on the class of object NPs or the construction in which they occur. This paper argues that DOM in Bodo encodes discourse prominence and the various referential and discourse properties are the prominence-lending cues which boost the discourse prominence of the object referents. Speakers often use DOM to dynamically signal the prominence status of discourse participants based on their communicative goal.