Article published in:
Differential objects and datives – a homogeneous class?
Edited by Monica Alexandrina Irimia and Anna Pineda
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes 42:1] 2019
► pp. 102–131

Prolegomena to the study of object relations

| University of the Basque Country/HiTT
| University of Extremadura
This paper argues that there is nothing “differential” in the licensing conditions of Differential Object Marking and outlines an analysis that unifies dom with dative object marking and with a broader set of “derived object”-marking configurations. We show that neither morphological nor syntactic distinctiveness can be the driving force for dom: accounts of dom as a morphological distinctiveness device are inadequate diachronically and very unefficient functionally. Syntactic analyses that postulate DP-internal differences or construction-specific double-licensing conditions fail to capture the basic fact that dom is a relation between the objects and the predicates selecting them. Precisely, the burden of our unified explanation falls on the checking requirements imposed to the DP complements by the structural heads selecting them.
Keywords: differential object marker, dative, distinctiveness, scales
Article outline
  • 1.Scales and other theoretical artifacts
    • 1.1Ambiguity
    • 1.2Scales
  • 2.Syntactic accounts
    • 2.1Differential licensing
    • 2.2The locus of parametric variation
  • 3.The importance of being an object
    • 3.1Direct objects
      • 3.1.1The house of dom
      • 3.1.2A note on specificity
      • 3.1.3 dom and agreement are not two sides of the same coin
      • 3.1.4Putting everything together. The derivation of Object dom
    • 3.2Derived objects
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 July 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00031.orm
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