Affectedness and Differential Object Marking in Spanish

Abstract

In this study we investigate the impact of affectedness on the diachronic development of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish. DOM in Spanish synchronically depends on (i) the referential features of the direct object, such as animacy and referentiality, and (ii) the semantics of the verb. Several studies have also shown that the diachronic development of DOM proceeds along the Animacy Scale and the Referentiality Scale, and some recent corpus studies have indicated an influence of the verb's semantics on this diachronic process. This study presents new findings from a detailed analysis of extensive corpus research on the distribution of DOM with respect to affectedness, understood as ''the persistent change of an event participant''. We use Tsunoda's Affectedness Scale to order the verb classes under investigation. Our findings provide evidence that this scale can be partly correlated with the diachronic spread of DOM in Spanish which would tend to confirm the influence of verbal semantics on DOM in Spanish.

Symmetric and asymmetric alternations in direct object encoding

“…Recently, von Heusinger & Kaiser (2011) have investigated the role of affectedness in the development of DOM in Spanish. They examined the occurrence of DOM in three different centuries (15 th , 17 th , and 19 th century, respectively) with twelve verbs chosen within five of the seven verb classes in the hierarchy identified by Tsunoda (1985), reproduced in (21):…”

“…Von Heusinger & Kaiser (2011) claim that, though affectedness is relevant for the development of DOM in Spanish, it is only a secondary parameter. Their results show that the distribution of DOM with the verb classes identified by Tsunoda (1985) is reversed to some extent, as is shown by the comparison between Tsunoda's original hierarchy given above and the ranking of verbs with respect to DOM in Spanish: perception > feeling, action > knowledge > pursuit Von Heusinger & Kaiser explain the discrepancies between Tsunoda's hierarchy and the findings for Spanish, in which perception and feeling verbs rank higher than action verbs, by appealing to the notion of agentivity, especially with regard to perception and feeling verbs.…”

Conditions on pronominal marking in the Alor-Pantar languages

“…Table 1 lists all factors that have been identified as playing a role in pronominal marking. Holton (2010) Similar factors to those found in constructions involving pronominal prefixes in the Alor-Pantar languages have been reported for differential object marking, including: animacy and definiteness (Bossong 1991;Aissen 2003), specificity (von Heusinger and Kaiser 2005), and affectedness (von Heusinger and Kaiser 2011). Volitionality is, among other things, argued to play a role in differential subject marking in Hindi (Mohanan 1990).…”

Direccionales con con y Marcado Diferencial de Objeto

“…Como es bien sabido (Bossong, 1985;Torrego, 1998;Delbecque, 1998;Leonetti, 2004;Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, 2007;Von Heusinger y Kaiser, 2011;López, 2012), este fenómeno se refiere a la situación en que constituyentes que desempeñan una misma función sintáctica reciben distintos tipos de marcado en función de propiedades internas de su sintagma determinante o del tipo de verbo con el que se combinan. (12) es un ejemplo prototípico de marcado diferencial aplicado al complemento directo español.…”