Volume 20, Issue 1

The use of the marker a with a direct object in Spanish is an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM), which is cross linguistically a well-documented phenomenon. In Spanish, there are two main dimensions that determine a-marking of direct objects: (i) the semantic and (discourse) pragmatic properties of the direct object, such as animacy, definiteness, specificity and topicality; and (ii) the lexical semantics of the verb, such as aktionsart properties and selectional restrictions with respect to the position of the direct object. Diachronically, a-marking spreads along the Referentiality Hierarchy from personal pronouns and proper names to definite and finally indefinite noun phrases, a process that has been well examined. In this study, I focus on the influence of the lexical semantics of verb classes on this process. I present original findings from two corpus searches from the 12th to the 20th century. The data show that the diachronic evolution of a-marking crucially depends on the verb semantics of the governing predicate, and that the change proceeds according to the Constant Rate Hypothesis of Kroch. These findings suggest that a-marking in Spanish, and DOM in general, can only be described in a multi-dimensional space consisting of the semantic properties of the direct object and the lexical semantics of the verb.

Many languages that display Differential Object Marking (DOM) and Clitic Doubling (CD), like Spanish and Romanian, show specificity restrictions in both grammatical environments. This paper is devoted to the problem of explaining why specificity effects are present in those constructions. I intend to give an answer to two interrelated questions: (i) What kind of connection holds between the two kinds of object marking?; (ii) How do specificity effects arise in both cases? An answer to question (i) involves a reexamination of the fundamental intuition behind so-called ‘Kayne's generalization’, i.e., the assumption that CD requires the object to be case-marked. I claim that the systematic co-occurrence of CD and DOM in certain languages is simply an effect of their semantic contribution to the proposition expressed. As for question (ii), my claim is that there is no unified account of specificity restrictions. In CD, they originate in the [+definite] feature of the clitic and the interpretive requirements it imposes on the associate DP (Gutiérrez-Rexach 2001): when the associate is an indefinite DP, the only way it can obey the matching condition established by the definite clitic in the doubling configuration is being assigned a specific (partitive or discourse-linked) reading. DOM, on the contrary, is not associated with specificity by means of definiteness and discourse-dependence. The basic property that triggers specificity constraints in DOM contexts, whatever it may be, does not give rise to the same presuppositionality effects and anaphoric readings that CD forces. Thus, specificity effects derive from different semantic features in the two constructions.

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.

In this paper, I show that a constraint-based approach to DOM, such as the OT system proposed by Aissen (2003), leads to the conclusion that the child will entertain a number of grammars different from the target grammar, before acquiring the final ranking of constraints, even under the learnability assumptions of the OT framework (such as those made by Tesar and Smolensky (1998, 2000). The data examined here, from Spanish-speaking children in the CHILDES database, clearly shows that children master Spanish DOM with a performance virtually errorless. This raises doubts regarding the capacity of the OT framework to explain a key aspect of human language, namely, the process of acquisition.