Differential object marking in a dialect of Sicily

Abstract

This contribution proposes an overview of the distribution of a-marked objects in a Romance dialect of Sicily, focusing on the relation between a-marking and the syntactic properties of the nominal structure in object position. The following properties are considered: type of lexical head (pronouns vs. nouns); coding of the Person feature on the lexical head and its relation with the functional head D; type of noun (proper names, kinship nouns, other nouns); lexical realization of the determiner (D head); definiteness and animacy of the object; Number. It will be shown that, in the dialect explored, a-marking is constrained by two major restrictions: (1) a-marking is only possible if the head D is phonetically realized, and (2) [+human] referents must be a-marked.