The present paper investigates the relationship between dislocation and differential object marking in some Romance languages. As in many languages that have a DOM system, it is usually also assumed that in Romance languages the phenomenon is regulated by the semantic features of the referents, such as animacy, definiteness, and specificity. In the languages under investigation, though, these features cannot explain the distribution and the emergence of DOM.After discussing the main theoretical approaches to the phenomenon, I will analyse DOM in four Romance languages. I will argue that DOM emerges in pragmatically and semantically marked contexts, namely with personal pronouns in dislocations.I will then show that in these languages the use of the DOM system is mainly motivated by the need to signal the markedness of these direct objects as a consequence of being used in (mainly left) dislocation as topics (cf. English "As for him, we didn't see him"). Finally, the examination of comparative data from Persian and Amazonian languages lends further support to the advocated approach in terms of information structure.
This paper examines two different strategies found in direct object encoding on the basis of a sample of 159 languages. In particular, this paper deals with the differences between symmetric (i.e. the alternation between two or more overt markers) and asymmetric (i.e. the alternation between a zero and one of more overt markers) alternations. The investigation is aimed at determining whether there are any evident cross-linguistic regularities with respect to the factors involved in these two kinds of alternation. It will be argued that the difference in the formal realization of direct object encoding is related to the distinct functions that these two structures perform cross-linguistically. While asymmetric alternations are regulated by referential properties of the direct object referent, symmetric alternations are governed by parameters related to verbal semantics, such as affectedness and boundedness, polarity, and quantification.Keywords: symmetric and asymmetric alternation, differentiated object marking, verbal aspect/ actionality, partitive case, identifiability
IntroductionAlternations in direct object (DO) encoding have been the subject of many studies in the past two decades. In particular, many studies have dealt with asymmetric (after de Hoop & Malchukov 2008) alternations in DO encoding, such as the one found in Persian, in which only definite DOs receive overt coding, while the others stay uncoded, as in (1)
Two principles shaping agreement paradigms have been implicitly assumed to constitute diachronic universals: (i) ergativity is assumed to be more likely to develop or be maintained in third than in non-third person; (ii) zeros are assumed to develop and be preserved more commonly in third than in non-third person. Estimating probabilities of diachronic change in a worldwide database and controling for areal diffusion effects, we find no evidence for (i). Principle (ii) receives no support either when examining how paradigms develop as systems, but we observe a weak cross-paradigm effect which is likely to be caused by frequency patterns during grammaticalization.
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