scholarly journals Differential Object Marking and Language Contact: An Introduction to this Special Issue

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Alexandru Mardale ◽  
Petros Karatsareas
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
Object Marking

scholarly journals The Differential Object Marking of The Arborense Dialect of Sardinian in Language Contact Setting

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-56
Author(s):  
Daniela Boeddu
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Extensive Area ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
Personal Names ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Mandatory Use

This paper focuses on the Arborense Differential Object Marking (dom) system, which in line with the typical Sardinian dom system marks the object noun phrases characterized by a high degree of animacy and specificity with the preposition a. This is why the Sardinian dom is also called prepositional accusative. Authors dealing with other Sardinian dialects agree in identifying three domains of distribution of the phenomenon: with personal pronouns and personal names the use of the preposition is mandatory; with inanimate common nouns it is excluded; with common nouns referring animate beings, strong variability occurs. On the basis of an oral corpus of contemporary Arborense, it can be stated that the area of mandatory use of dom is restricted in this dialect and that the optionality area turns out to be more extensive than assumed in traditional descriptions of this Sardinian phenomenon. Since all the Arborense speakers of the oral corpus are bilingual (Sardinian-Italian), the data reflect the situation of dom in a contact setting scenario where Sardinian and both Standard and Regional Italian interact. According to Putzu (2005) and Blasco Ferrer and Ingrassia (2010), the extensive area of optionality for the use of the Sardinian dom should be the result of the influence of Standard Italian. However, two facts must be considered that make this idea questionable: first, in the language contact scenario of Modern Sardinian not only Standard Italian but also Regional Italian (with a widespread use of the dom) play a role; second, the synchronic variation observed in contemporary Arborense replicates the same variation which characterizes historical data from texts of the 12th–19th centuries.

scholarly journals Language-Specific Transitivities in Contact: The Case of Coptic

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-115
Author(s):  
Eitan Grossman
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
P Domain ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Object Indexing

This paper sketches the integration of Greek-origin loan verbs into the valency and transitivity patterns of Coptic (Afroasiatic, Egypt), arguing that transitivities are language-specific descriptive categories, and the comparison of donor-language transitivity with target-language transitivity reveals fine-grained degrees of loan-verb integration. Based on a comparison of Coptic Transitivity and Greek Transitivity, it is shown that Greek-origin loanwords are only partially integrated into the transitivity patterns of Coptic. Specifically, while Greek-origin loan verbs have the same coding properties as native verbs in terms of the A domain, i.e., Differential Subject Marking (dsm), they differ in important respects in terms of the P domain, i.e., Differential Object Marking (dom) and Differential Object Indexing (doi). A main result of this study is that language contact – specifically, massive lexical borrowing – can induce significant transitivity splits in a language’s lexicon and grammar. Furthermore, the findings of this study cast doubt on the usefulness of an overarching cross-linguistic category of transitivity.

scholarly journals Asimetrías gramaticales asociadas a la animacidad en la lengua vasca: una perspectiva tipológica / Animacy-based grammatical asymmetries in Basque: a typological perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iván Igartua ◽  
Ekaitz Santazilia
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
The Other ◽  
Case Assignment ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
The One

This study provides a typological analysis of two phenomena related to case-marking in Basque. In both of them, animacy —or the distinction between what is animate and what is not— turns out to be determinant: we discuss case assignment to direct objects, on the one hand, and marking of locative cases, on the other hand. We have compared the two phenomena with diverse typological parallels in order to account for the variety of possible morphological strategies and identify particular conditions and restrictions. Furthermore, we have argued that differential object marking in Basque is a recent phenomenon, induced by language contact, whereas differential locative marking has an intralinguistic nature. Finally, we have defended that the role of animacy in both types of differential marking is different: in the first example it conditions case assignment and in the second it operates as a grammatical gender.

Syntactic Change in Contact: Romance

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta D'Alessandro
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
Languages In Contact ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Selection Of

Language change as a result of language contact is studied in many different ways using a number of different methodologies. This article provides an overview of the main approaches to syntactic change in contact (CIC), focusing on the Romance language group. Romance languages are widely documented both synchronically and diachronically. They have been in extensive contact with other language families both in bilingual contexts and in creolization contexts. Furthermore, they present great microvariation. They are therefore ideal to tackle language change in contact. Given the breadth of studies targeting Romance languages in contact, only a selection of facts is considered here, namely pro-drop, differential object marking (DOM), and deixis. The article shows that microcontact, i.e., contact between minimally different grammars, is a necessary dimension to be considered within contact studies, as it provides insights that are often radically different from those provided by the observation of contact between maximally different languages. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 7 is January 14, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Morpho-syntactic Variation in Romance v: A Micro-parametric Approach

Probus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 401-437
Author(s):  
Ángel J. Gallego
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Parametric Approach ◽  
Syntactic Variation ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
University Of Leiden ◽  
Parametric Variation ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Auxiliary Selection ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Syntactic Properties

AbstractThis paper discusses a series of morpho-syntactic properties of Romance languages that have the functional projection vP as its locus, showing a continuum that goes from strongly configurational Romance languages to partially configurational Romance languages. It is argued that v-related phenomena like Differential Object Marking (DOM), participial agreement, oblique clitics, auxiliary selection, and others align in a systematic way when it comes to inflectional properties that involve Case-agreement properties. In order to account for the facts, I argue for a micro-parametric approach whereby v can be associated with an additional projection subject to variation (cf. D’Alessandro, Merging Probes. A typology of person splits and person-driven differential object marking. Ms., University of Leiden, 2012; Microvariation and syntactic theory. What dialects tell us about language. Invited talk given at the workshop The Syntactic Variation of Catalan and Spanish Dialects, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, June 26–28, 2013; Ordóñez, Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan. In Sergio Baauw, Frank AC Drijkoningen & Manuela Pinto (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2005: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’, Utrecht, 8–10 December 2005, 259–280. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). I label such projection “X,” arguing that its feature content and position varies across Romance. More generally, the present paper aims at contributing to our understanding of parametric variation of closely related languages by exploiting the intuition, embodied in the so-called Borer-Chomsky Conjecture, that linguistic variation resides in the functional inventory of the lexicon.

scholarly journals Introduction: Shades of partitivity: Formal and areal properties

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-619
Author(s):  
Tabea Ihsane ◽  
Elisabeth Stark
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Formal Description ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Case Markers

AbstractAt the heart of this special issue are partitive elements (i. e., partitive articles, partitive pronouns, and partitive case markers) which can express different “shades” of partitivity, namely true partitivity, pseudopartitivity, or indefiniteness, that is, the absence of a part-whole relation in the meaning, in contrast to (pseudo)partitivity. Since these partitive elements express (at least) two such notions, as they can be truly partitive but often are not, the questions around partitivity are complex, interrelated and challenging. This special issue, with a strong and wide crosslinguistic (typological) coverage, deals with two overarching topics: first, the geographical distribution of partitive elements and the identification of potential instances of language contact, and, second, sometimes in combination with the first topic, the formal description and explanation of different partitive constructions.

The processing of case in near-native Spanish

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Jegerski
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
L2 Processing ◽  
Case Marker ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Case Markers ◽  
Ditransitive Constructions

This article reports a study that sought to determine whether non-native sentence comprehension can show sensitivity to two different types of Spanish case marking. Sensitivity to case violations was generally more robust with indirect objects in ditransitive constructions than with differential object marking of animate direct objects, even among native speakers of Spanish, which probably reflects linguistic differences in the two types of case. In addition, the overall outcome of two experiments shows that second language (L2) processing can integrate case information, but that, unlike with native processing, attention to a case marker may depend on the presence of a preverbal clitic as an additional cue to the types of postverbal arguments that might occur in a stimulus. Specifically, L2 readers showed no sensitivity to differential object marking with a in the absence of clitics in the first experiment, with stimuli such as Verónica visita al/el presidente todos los meses ‘Veronica visits the[ACC/NOM]president every month’, but the L2 readers in the second experiment showed native-like sensitivity to the same marker when the object it marked was doubled by the clitic lo, as in Verónica lo visita al/el presidente todos los meses. With indirect objects, on the other hand, sensitivity to case markers was native-like in both experiments, although indirect objects were also always doubled by the preverbal clitic le. The apparent first language / second language contrast suggests differences in processing strategy, whereby non-native processing of morphosyntax may rely more on the predictability of forms than does native processing.

Typology and diachrony of converbs in Indo-Aryan

Diachronica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Stroński ◽  
Leonid Kulikov
Keyword(s):  
Recent Discussion ◽  
Verbal System ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
Role And Reference Grammar ◽  
Reference Grammar ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
The One

Abstract Non-finite forms constitute an important component of the verbal system of Indo-Aryan (IA) languages. On the one hand, some of them, such as e.g., converbs, have already received proper attention in historical linguistics and typological literature, with regard to Old Indo-Aryan (OIA), Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) and New Indo-Aryan (NIA) (cf. Tikkanen 1987; Peterson 1998; Subbarao 2012 among others). Other forms, such as participles, have usually been analysed in the wider context of reorganisation of a finite verbal system which led to alignment change (for recent discussion see Dahl and Stroński 2016). On the other hand, adverbial participles or infinitives have so far been under-studied (cf. Sigorski 2005), particularly within early NIA. This period in the history of IA languages witnessed several important morphosyntactic developments and still requires in-depth study, particularly due to the lack of well-edited corpora. The aim of the present paper is to partly fill this gap by highlighting major trends in the development of constructions based on various non-finite forms in early NIA. We focus on main argument marking in converbal chain constructions and its interplay with the animacy hierarchy. We demonstrate a relative stability of differential case marking (DCM), focusing mainly on conditions on differential subject marking (DSM) and differential object marking (DOM). In addition, we compare converbal chain constructions with participial absolute constructions (AC). Finally, in order to give a holistic view of converbal constructions, we verify the type of linking instantiated by them, focusing on three scopal parameters in converbal constructions (Tense, Illocutionary Force and Negation) and using the apparatus of Role and Reference Grammar and Multivariate Analysis.

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