DOM and other object-marking strategies

Abstract

AbstractRecent accounts have argued, for a variety of unrelated languages, that more than one case assigner or more than one syntactic licensing operation is needed for certain types of nominals (Brattico 2011, Matushansky 2012, Vainikka and Brattico 2014, Forbes 2020, Oxford 2019, Irimia in press, a.o.). Here we discuss structural aspects of differential objects in a set of genetically unrelated languages from Romance, Indo-Aryan, Tupí-Guaraní, and southwestern Basque, examining their interaction with other object licensing strategies. We propose that the licensing of certain types of differential objects, including those signalled with oblique morphology (oblique DOM), involve the presence of an additional functional projection beyond the regular Case assigner valuing [uCase]. This additional licenser acts in conjunction with the initial Case assigner/licenser on nominals which contain an additional discourse-linking ([person]) feature (related to grammaticalized animacy and specificity), beyond [uCase]. One consequence is that in some of the languages discussed here the initial [uCase] strategy, which might result in object agreement, can surface concomitantly with oblique DOM.