Rotuman and Fijian case-marking strategies and their historical development

Although the Fijian languages and Rotuman are thought to be closely related genetically, and are all accusative languages, considerable difference are observed in their case-marking strategies. This paper describes the variou s strategies to be found in these languages, and discusses how they could h ave developed from a single protosystem. It is argued that in Rotuman, wher e it is word order alone that marks nouns as Nominative or Accusative, the preverbal position of clitic pronouns was generalized to become also the po sition of full noun phrases. On the other hand, in Fijian languages, differ ent strategies resulted int he original clitic pronouns either remaining as clitics, or becoming grammaticalized as agreement features on the verb.