Triggering and blocking effects in the diachronic development of DOM in Romanian

Abstract

According to recent studies, the diachronic development of differential object marking (DOM) in Romance is expected to start from elements high on the definiteness scale and spread steadily to elements low on the definiteness scale, whereby each development step is facilitated by fine-grained semantic distinctions which act as triggering conditions (cf. von Heusinger and Kaiser 2005). In Romanian the expected line of development can be observed until the 19th century, however this unidirectional evolution is surprisingly reversed around the 19th–20th century: the conditions for the marking of indefinite direct objects with the preposition pe are more restrained today than two centuries ago.

In this study we present the diachronic development of DOM in Romanian based on a diachronic corpus consisting of Bible translations from different centuries. We shall contend that the transition of DOM from one referential category to another, such as from proper names to definite NPs and from definite NPs to indefinite NPs is enabled by some distinction in the category DOM is spreading to. For instance in 16th century Romanian DOM spreads to definite NPs such that first NPs having a strong unique interpretation get pe-marked while other definite NPs receive DOM only in a later step involving the neutralization of this transitory distinction. However, Romanian data show that such a fine-graded distinction may not only occur in the category DOM is spreading to but also inside of referential categories already pe-marked. In this case the transitory distinction may trigger a regress in DOM. This is the case in the 19th century, when specific indefinite NPs are often pe-marked and a new semantic distinction between different types of referential anchoring involves a re-interpretation of the semantic import of pe-marking such that a certain part of indefinite direct objects systematically lose DOM. We shall argue that the trigger of this new semantic distinction is the independent development of the Romanian clitic doubling system which DOM gets strongly correlated to: the correlation between clitic doubling and DOM combines two slightly different semantic features, which we shall model by the fine structure of specificity. The combination of these features leads to pragmatically motivated language change.