Specificity and Differential Object Marking in Spanish

Abstract

The use of the preposition a with direct objects in Spanish is a well known instance of the general phenomenon of Differential Object Marking (DOM). In Spanish grammars the insertion of a is usually presented as dependent on two basic factors: animacy and referentiality/specificity. The correlation between the object marker and specificity is not systematic, basically because animacy -and not specificity-is the dominant trigger for DOM in Spanish, but a number of facts still indicate that the presence of a tends to be associated with specific readings. In order to account for these facts without positing any [+specific] feature in the linguistic meaning of a, I try to show that it contributes to utterance interpretation as an internal topic marker. This seems to be the simplest way to derive «specificity effects», and to account for the crosslinguistic similarities between DOM and other grammatical phenomena (topicalization, clitic doubling, scrambling).Key words: specificity, animacy, topicality, object marking, inference. * I am grateful to the participants at the workshop «Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Specificity in Romance Languages» (Konstanz, October 2002) and to two anonymous reviewers of Catalan Journal of Linguistics for very useful and thought-provoking comments, as well as to Vicky Escandell-Vidal and Olga Fernández-Soriano for helpful discussion on an earlier draft. Thanks also to Begoña Vicente for patiently correcting my English. PreliminariesIt is well known that several languages use certain grammatical devices as object markers that are in some sense associated with the Specific / Non-Specific distinction. Spanish is one of them, and Romanian, Turkish, Persian or Hindi are frequently mentioned as other representative cases of the general phenomenon which, following Georg Bossong's proposal, we call Differential Object Marking (DOM) 1 . My aim in this paper will be that of determining what is the particular contribution of DOM to utterance interpretation in Spanish, and how specificity is related to it. I would like to begin by presenting some basic assumptions about the Semantics / Pragmatics interface and on the notion of specificity, in order to use them later in the analysis of the Spanish prepositional accusative. I intend to show that, although the correlation between the accusative marker and specificity is far from clear, basically because animacy -and not specificity-is the dominant trigger for DOM in Spanish, a number of facts still indicate that the prepositional accusative tends to be associated with specific readings, in a way which is not unrelated to what happens in scrambling and clitic doubling constructions. Far from deriving from some [+ specific] feature inherent in the meaning of a, such facts can be shown to be a consequence of a different basic semantic feature that should allow us to bring together most of the grammatical phenomena that are sensitive to specificity. Some closing remarks on specificity in grammatical structure will sum up the discussion.I wi...

Symmetric and asymmetric alternations in direct object encoding

“…In fact, other accounts relate the diachrony and the synchronic distribution of Spanish DOM to topicality, as shown by Laca (1995), Pensado (1995), Leonetti (2004) among others. In particular, Pensado (1995) has convincingly argued that the development of DOM in Spanish started with the left dislocation of personal pronouns.…”

Event-related brain potential evidence for animacy processing asymmetries during sentence comprehension

“…At least 300 languages of the world have differential object marking (e.g., Bossong, 1991). In Castilian Spanish, the language used here, animacy is among the most important features that controls object marking (e.g., Garcia Garcia, 2007; see also Leonetti, 2004): the differential object marker, the prepositional accusative (or, personal) 'a', is required for definite and specific direct objects when the object is animate but ungrammatical for inanimate objects (e.g., ''Natxo escuchó a Agata/ Ã a la canción'': Natxo listened to Agata/the song). Differential object marking has been explained in terms of prominence/markedness (e.g., Aissen, 2003;but see García García, 2007): because animate objects are less prototypical, and therefore more prominent direct objects, they are linguistically marked and receive case-marking, whereas economy dictates that case-marking should be omitted in other situations (see also Primus, 2011).…”

Case and referential properties

“…The distribution of the Spanish object marker a has been extensively discussed in the literature but still is not entirely understood (for discussion, see Brugé and Brugger 1996;Torrego 1998;Delbecque 2002;von Heusinger and Kaiser 2003;Leonetti 2004;Bleam 2005, among many others). On our interpretation the occurrence of a follows an intricate pattern in which different split alternations and a fluid case alternation interact.…”

“…Leonetti (2004) argues that direct objects without a can only be interpreted as non-specific. Indefinite objects preceded by a, by contrast, can be interpreted as both specific and non-specific.…”