Animacy effects on differential Goal marking
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Seppo Kittilä
Abstract
This paper examines Differential R Marking (DRM) – i.e., the effects of animacy on the encoding of goals (R), as in ‘a linguist sent a book to the phonetician/to the town’ – from a crosslinguistic perspective. The phenomenon comprises three types, which are distinguished based on whether R can be marked in the same way as the transitive Patient or not (animate Rs usually allow this, while inanimate Rs usually surface as obliques). Even though DRM shares common features with Differential Object Marking (DOM), the two phenomena cannot be explained by the same functions. The findings of this article support the view that differences in object coding (comprising both DRM and DOM) are best explained by affectedness rather than ambiguity avoidance.
©Walter de Gruyter
