Guest speaker: Monica Irimia (Ph.D. 2011, now at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia): "Oblique DOM in enriched case hierarchies."
In a cross-linguistically robust type of differential object marking (DOM), specifications at the higher end of animacy/referentiality scales are signalled via oblique morphology (Bossong 1991, 1998, Masica 1993, Torrego 1998, Lazard 2001, López 2012, Manzini and Franco 2016, 2019, Fernández and Rezac 2016, Odria 2017, 2019, a.o.). A well-known example comes from Spanish, illustrated in (1). The definite human DP in (1a) needs a marker which is homophonous with the dative; the same marker is ungrammatical with the inanimate in (1b). One challenge is that despite their oblique appearance, such objects exhibit the syntax of structural accusatives in many languages (Bárány 2018 for recent discussion, a.o). Thus, in numerous descriptive and formal accounts alike, oblique DOM reduces to a matter of allomorphy more generally seen with accusatives (the ‘prepositional accusative’ tradition, Rohlfs 1971, 1973, Roegiest 1979, Halle and Marantz 1993, Keine and Müller 2008, Keine 2010, López 2012, a.o.). However, this raises the question of how to capture the relevant syncretism without incurring an ABA pattern (Johnston 1996, Caha 2009, 2017, Bobaljik 2012, 2015, Harðarson 2016, Starke 2017, McFadden 2018, Smith et. al 2018, Zompì 2019, a.o., for syncretism and *ABA). More simply put, the DOM-oblique syncretism would require the two categories to be adjacent on the case sequence. But as individual languages use various oblique means (dative, locative, genitive, etc.) which can also interact with other licensing strategies, none of the ‘simple’ case hierarchies can derive the facts in a uniform manner. Examining data from a set of language families including Romance, Indo-Aryan, Basque, Slavic, etc., we propose that a solution comes from the use of so-called Enriched Case Hierarchies, which contain more than one accusative category (following observations in Stake 2017). As oblique DOM affects various alignment types, we also illustrate similar problems from ergative-absolutive systems. The logic behind enriched case hierarchies is moreover an opportunity to probe the similarities/differences oblique DOM shows with respect to other structural objects, leading to a better understanding of its nature.
(1) Spanish (Ormazabal and Romero 2013, ex.1 a,b)
a. He encontrado *(a) la niña.
have.1sg found dat=dom def.f.sg girl
‘I have found the girl.'
b. He encontrado (*a) el libro.
have1sg found dat=dom def.m.sg book
‘I have found the book.'
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