The question whether differential object marking (DOM, Bossong 1991, Aissen 2003, a.o.) should be tied to Case licensing or some other mechanism in the grammar has received renewed attention lately. This presentation discusses DOM data from a variety of language families (Romance, Indo-Aryan, Altaic, Basque, Sinitic, Germanic, etc.). Two important conclusions emerge: i) the split licensed vs. unlicensed is not enough to derive the (morpho-syntactic) behavior of DOM; ii) DOM is independent of subject licensing. The proposed analysis builds on observations that link DOM to a (discourse-related) specification beyond uninterpretable Case per se (Leonetti 2008, Iemmolo 2010, Dalrymple and Nikolaeva 2011, D'Alessandro 2017, a.o.) and to nominals with a complex structure such that more than one licensing operation is needed on them (starting from Jaeggli 1982, a.o). One result is that DOM is not the only type of structural object that needs abstract licensing (supporting observations by Torrego 1998, Bhatt 2007, López 2012, a.o.). Additionally, to best account for the data, this domain provides further motivation for nominal licensing by a combination of two X0 (extending proposals previously put forward for the ergative, Deal 2010, Clem 2019, a.o.). Another result is that divorcing DOM from the presence and licensing of subjects permits a better understanding and parametrization of contexts in which morphology traditionally labeled as DOM is seen on subjects too.
References
Aissen, Jidith. 2003. Differential object marking: iconicity vs. economy. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21(3):435–483
Bhatt, Rajesh. 2007. Unaccusativity and case licensing. Available at: https://people.umass.edu/bhatt/papers/mcgill-may2007-handout1.pdf
Bossong, Georg. 1991. Differential Object Marking in Romance and beyond. In New Analyses in Romance Linguistics: Selected Papers from the XVIII Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, ed. by Dieter Wanner and Douglas A. Kibbee, 143–170, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Clem, Emily. 2019. Amahuaca ergative as agreement with multiple heads. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 37(3):785–823.
Dalrymple, Mary and Irina Nikolaeva. 2011. Objects and information structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
D'Alessandro, Roberta. 2017. When you have too many features: auxiliaries, agreement and clitics in Italian varieties. Glossa 2(1), 50: 1-36.
Deal, Amy Rose. 2010. Ergative case and the transitive subject. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28(1):73–120.
Iemmolo, Giorgio. 2010. Topicality and DOM: Evidence from Romance and beyond. Studies in language 34(2): 239-272.
Jaeggli, Osvaldo. 1982. Topics in Romance syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Leonetti, Manuel. 2008. Specificity in clitic doubling and in differential object marking. Probus 20 (1):33–66.
López, Luis. 2012. Indefinite objects: scrambling, choice functions and differential marking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Torrego, Esther. 1998. The dependencies of objects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
