Prolegomena to the study of object relations
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.
Article outline
- 1.Scales and other theoretical artifacts
- 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
-
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