This paper explores bound person marking (indexing) of the S/A argument in Gutob, which is peculiar in that in cannot only occur on the verb, but on various other hosts in different syntactic positions as well, without change in meaning. Our corpus-based analysis shows that indexes are actively employed to allocate attention to constituents, and express engagement with a particular piece of information. So although there are no hard-and-fast grammatical rules underlying index placement in Gutob, it is still rule-governed, motivated by communicative factors.

Link to publication in Studies in Language