The use of the preposition a with direct objects in Spanish is a well known instance of the general phenomenon of Differential Object Marking (DOM). In Spanish grammars the insertion of a is usually presented as dependent on two basic factors: animacy and referentiality/specificity. The correlation between the object marker and specificity is not systematic, basically because animacy -and not specificity-is the dominant trigger for DOM in Spanish, but a number of facts still indicate that the presence of a tends to be associated with specific readings. In order to account for these facts without positing any [+specific] feature in the linguistic meaning of a, I try to show that it contributes to utterance interpretation as an internal topic marker. This seems to be the simplest way to derive «specificity effects», and to account for the crosslinguistic similarities between DOM and other grammatical phenomena (topicalization, clitic doubling, scrambling).Key words: specificity, animacy, topicality, object marking, inference. * I am grateful to the participants at the workshop «Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Specificity in Romance Languages» (Konstanz, October 2002) and to two anonymous reviewers of Catalan Journal of Linguistics for very useful and thought-provoking comments, as well as to Vicky Escandell-Vidal and Olga Fernández-Soriano for helpful discussion on an earlier draft. Thanks also to Begoña Vicente for patiently correcting my English. PreliminariesIt is well known that several languages use certain grammatical devices as object markers that are in some sense associated with the Specific / Non-Specific distinction. Spanish is one of them, and Romanian, Turkish, Persian or Hindi are frequently mentioned as other representative cases of the general phenomenon which, following Georg Bossong's proposal, we call Differential Object Marking (DOM) 1 . My aim in this paper will be that of determining what is the particular contribution of DOM to utterance interpretation in Spanish, and how specificity is related to it. I would like to begin by presenting some basic assumptions about the Semantics / Pragmatics interface and on the notion of specificity, in order to use them later in the analysis of the Spanish prepositional accusative. I intend to show that, although the correlation between the accusative marker and specificity is far from clear, basically because animacy -and not specificity-is the dominant trigger for DOM in Spanish, a number of facts still indicate that the prepositional accusative tends to be associated with specific readings, in a way which is not unrelated to what happens in scrambling and clitic doubling constructions. Far from deriving from some [+ specific] feature inherent in the meaning of a, such facts can be shown to be a consequence of a different basic semantic feature that should allow us to bring together most of the grammatical phenomena that are sensitive to specificity. Some closing remarks on specificity in grammatical structure will sum up the discussion.I wi...

IntroductionSpanish and Romanian, among Romance languages, exhibit a systematic combination of two different devices for object marking, i.e. Clitic Doubling (hereinafter, CD) and Differential Object Marking (hereinafter, DOM). In this paper I will discuss mostly Spanish 2 data, with the aim of focusing on the well known specificity constraints that hold both in CD and in DOM, and offering an account of their similarities and differences. I will restrict my attention to direct object CD; moreover, I will assume that

The Definiteness Effect (DE) in existential contexts appears as a robust constraint in some languages (Spanish) while it seems to be absent in others (Italian, Catalan). However, a closer inspection of Italian and Catalan data shows that the DE has some presence in those languages as well, when the coda of the existential is explicit and occurs inside the VP. This paper investigates the effects produced by the coda on definiteness, and connects such effects to other constraints on the licensing of postverbal subjects, all ultimately tied to information structure. I suggest that a clash between definiteness and Focus structure is at the origin of the DE, when definite expressions resist insertion into pure thetic or Broad Focus sentences.

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