Differential Object Marking and the properties of D in the dialects of the extreme south of Italy

Abstract

This paper discusses two case studies of microvariation in accusative marking in the Italo-Romance varieties of the extreme south of Italy. In particular, the diatopic variation displayed by the dialects of southern Calabria gives rise to peculiar patterns of alternation between presence or absence of the marker a 'to' in flagging the accusative. The realisation of accusative case is partially governed by semantic and referential features, i.e. specificity and animacy. In addition, the nature of the realisation of the D head results in a degree of competition between zero marking and analytic accusative marking with a. Given the century-long coexistence of Latin/Romance and Greek in southern Calabria, the relevant morphosyntactic patterns in Casemarking will also be examined from a language contact perspective. We will highlight how the relevant outcomes do not simply involve borrowing mechanisms or template copying from the lending variety but, rather, produce hybrid structures no longer ascribable to a purely Romance or Greek grammar.

Differential Object Marking in Apulia: A descriptive overview

“…Indeed, specificity is one of the main discriminating factors triggering DOM in many Romance varieties, as is the case in Spanish (Torrego 1998;Leonetti 2004Leonetti , 2008i.a. ), Neapolitan (Ledgeway 2000(Ledgeway , 2009, and Sicilian (Guardiano 2010). For these reasons, our test focuses on specific vs non-specific definites ( § 2.3) and indefinites ( § 2.4) nouns.…”

“…Ledgeway, forthc., for early (Italo-)Romance), which only surfaces with highly referential and specific personal pronominal objects, as these show no DOM with indefinite pronominal quantifiers ( § 2.2). In contrast, N-C Apulian varieties have a more extended DOM system, in which all determinerless referents are a-marked, in a similar manner to Neapolitan (Ledgeway 2000(Ledgeway , 2009 or Sicilian (Guardiano 2010).…”

Variation in differential object marking: On some differences between Spanish and Romanian

“…A preliminary summary of the Spanish obligatory contexts is given in Table 1. As a methodological background, we follow the procedures in recent parametric comparison research, especially Roberts (1998Roberts ( , 2012Roberts ( , 2017, the Parametric Comparison Method Longobardi 2005, Longobardi andGuardiano 2009) or Ledgeway et al (2019). Descriptively, we take the contexts/properties/characteristics discussed below to act as (surface) parametric points and thus as comparanda for the examination of the two languages discussed here.…”

Vulnerability and stability of Differential Object Marking in Romanian heritage speakers

“…Object prominence is determined by several semantic and pragmatic factors related to animacy, specificity, referentiality, and focus, among others, and it is often marked overtly with specific morphology, case marking, or agreement, depending on the language. The nature of DOM has been receiving increasing attention (Bárány 2018;Börstell 2019;Ledgeway, Schifano & Silvestri 2019) because DOM exhibits synchronic and diachronic variability within and across languages. For example, among the Romance languages, Spanish, Romanian, and Sardinian have DOM, whereas Portuguese, French, and other dialects of Italian do not.…”