Differential object marking

Abstract

AbstractChapter 8 is dedicated to the noun types that have been identified in the previous chapters as DOM-marked. This is the case for a class of nouns in Tamil and Korean. As expected, these noun types do not show any movement restrictions, akin to case-marked objects in the respective languages. Moreover, their binding, control, and scope properties are not affected by case loss. Thus, Tamil and Korean (possibly also Hindi) provide evidence for the view that pseudo-incorporation and differential object marking do not present two sides of the same coin. On the contrary, each grammatical process has to be accounted for independently, but ideally with the same theoretical account for optional case marking. Furthermore, two anomalies in the data set are discussed, with interesting consequences for control theory.