Marking subject/object that is not a pronoun?

Question

I've recently been on a kind of a morphology seminar and was informed that it is not an uncommon phenomenon for languages to specifically mark subjects and objects which are not pronouns - an example being the Coptic language.

Unfortunately all of my internet queries upon this subject have been to no avail because I do not know the name of this phenomenon. Has anyone here ever heard of something like this and would they be able to put a name on it?

(EDIT)

Some example sentences illustrating this kind of marking in Coptic:

eseqep-paibōk (FUT-she FUT-catch (-) NPOBJ-that-slave)

nerepaiqam napōt (COND-NPSUB-that-bull COND-run)

šansotmk (PRES-we-hear-you)

erepennēb nempefjaje ewem-phalēt (FUT-NPSUB-our-master and-his-enemy FUT-eat (-) NPOBJ-bird)

erepjaje ehotbs (FUT-NPSUB-enemy FUT-kill-she)

šarepairōme wōm (PRES-NPSUB-that-man eat)

nesnabel-pekqam (COND-she-COND-untie (-) NPOBJ-your-bull)

It was said that -rep- marks a non-pronoun subject (glossed NPSUB) and p- a non-pronoun object (glossed NPOBJ).

Answer 1

Note: I don't know any Coptic.

-rep- and -p- both share the element [p]. Coptic is supposed to have have a prefixed definite article with the consonant [p] for masculine nouns. This suggests to me that -rep- is not a single morpheme, but is further subdivisible. "pai" seems to mean "that". You could look at whether equivalently structured sentences with a feminine noun contain -ret- instead of -rep-. Likewise, this would mean that glossing -p- as an object marker seems like a pretty bad decision, unless there are other factors that I don't know about.

The Wikipedia article on Coptic says "Coptic has a very large number of distinct tense-aspect-mood categories, expressed by particles which are either before the verb or before the subject".

One of these is given as "nere" (before an NP) or nef- (with a third-person masculine pronominal subject). The article seems to analyze "re" as part of the particle, not part of the following noun phrase.

Note that in your examples, the gloss "NPSUB" always occurs directly after a gloss for a TAM category (like COND, FUT, PRES).

I think the gloss you have for the sentence "ere-p-jaje e-hotb-s", "FUT-NPSUB-enemy FUT-kill-she", is inaccurate in that Wikipedia suggests that a pronoun suffixed to a verb functions as an object pronoun. So the final -s- seems to mean "her" rather than "she" (I guess the translation would be "The enemy will kill her"?). The gloss I would suggest is something like "FUT.NP-DEF-enemy FUT-kill-3s.F".

Differential inflection of words based on whether they are used with pronouns vs. noun phrases does show up in other languages. Welsh has prepositions that inflect when used with pronouns and also shows different patterns of verb agreement with pronouns vs. noun phrases (e.g. only pronouns trigger plural verb agreement).