5 Close and remote objects in a language with a single transitive suffix Anna Margetts 1. Introduction The distinction between “close” and “remote” objects has widely been discussed in the Oceanic literature (e.g., Pawley 1973, 1986, Pawley and Reid 1980). Historically, this distinction is associated with the choice between the two Proto Oceanic (POc) transitivising suffixes *-i, adding patient objects, and *-aki(ni), adding objects with semantic roles like location, goal, instrument, or cause, i.e., roles which cross-linguistically are more typically expressed by oblique noun phrases. Many modern Oceanic languages show reflexes of both suffixes and maintain the distinction between two object types. In this study I show that the distinction between close and remote objects remains relevant even in a lan- guage which has only a single transitive suffix. Saliba is a Western Oceanic language of the Papuan Tip cluster (Ross 1988: 190-212). It belongs to the Suauic family and it is spoken by about one thou- sand people on Saliba Island at the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea. 1 Saliba is a nominative-accusative, mainly head-marking, language with SOV word order for lexical elements. The verb obligatorily carries a subject prefix and, if it is transitive, an object suffix. 2 2. Saliba verb classes and the applicative suffix In their seminal paper Pawley and Reid (1980: 105) describe transitive verbs as a morphologically well defined category in POc. They state: A transitive verb is any verb which (a) carries a transitive suffix *-i or *-aki(ni), and/or (b) carries a pronominal suffix or clitic determining person and number of direct object… Nearly all transitive verbs exhibit both features (a) and (b). In Saliba the same definition for transitive verbs can be applied, apart from the fact that there is only a single transitivising suffix -i (with the allomorphs -(C)i and -(C)ei). This transitive or applicative suffix, as it is labelled in Mar- getts (1999), derives transitive verbs from intransitive ones. The Saliba suffix