Differential object marking and Scales: insights from diachrony

Abstract

This paper addresses a generally ignored counterexample to the Scales, comparing Old Catalan and Old Romanian on the one hand to Old Spanish on the other hand. Contrary to widely assumed marking hierarchies, Old Catalan/Old Romanian 3rd person pronouns show differential object marking, to the exclusion of or to a higher degree than 1st/2nd persons. We propose these patterns can be straightforwardly derived once we pin down micro-parameters in the composition of Romance DPs and the consequences various types of perspectival/sentience features have on the syntactic licensing of arguments.

Differential Object Marking in Romance

“…The author goes on to argue that the late starting point for the loss of the Latin case system seems to lie at the root of the much narrower expansion of DOM usage in Catalan compared to Spanish, where this loss began about a century earlier. Further confirmation of the autonomous origins of Catalan DOM can be found in more recent studies, for example by Irimia/Pineda (2019). The authors underline fundamental differences between Spanish and Catalan DOM and cite examples from texts as early as the 14 th century.…”

Differential object marking in the dialects of southern Italy: an overview

“…Rohlfs (1971: 327, 330f. ), Sornicola (1997: 77), Ledgeway (2000: 20ff., 2009: 833f., 836), Fiorentino (2003, Iemmolo (2010: § 3.4); for apparent exceptions, see Parry (2003) for early Ligurian, and Irimia and Pineda (2019) We thus witness in the Neapolitan examples reported in ( 41)-( 43) a progressive but structured diachronic extension of DOM from the most marked and restrictive option at the bottom of the parametric hierarchy in Figure 1 towards increasingly less marked and restrictive parametric options towards the top of the hierarchy in accordance with a pattern widely replicated across Romance in both diachrony and synchrony. Indeed, in those rare modern northern Romance varieties which are reported to show a highly restricted use of DOM (cf.…”

Syntactic Change in Contact: Romance

“…In standard Catalan, the DOM marker a is obligatory with pronouns and with dislocated DP objects, but it is usually dropped with full DPs when they are adjacent to the verb (Benito 2017). According to Escandell-Vidal (2007, 2009, Catalan DOM is sensitive to definiteness; it is obligatory with topics as well as with foci and in several other contexts (see also Irimia & Pineda 2019), including when disambiguation between an inanimate subject and an animate object is required.…”

“…Benito reports that this overextension of Spanish DOM to Catalan is perceived by bilingual speakers as a Hispanism and is in fact referred to as castellanisme (Moll 1991, Badia Margarit 1994. Note that Moll (1991) claims that DOM in Catalan is entirely borrowed from Spanish, as it did not exist in old Catalan, but this has been proven wrong by Irimia & Pineda (2019). Looking at microcontact, unlike what happens to Spanish and Russian in contact with English, Catalan in contact with Spanish overextends the contexts of application of DOM.…”