Differential objects and other structural objects

Abstract

Abstract. Several recent accounts take adpositional differential marking to indicate those classes of DPs that require obligatory licensing (Case). Here, we examine data from Gujarati and Romanian where this analysis is harder to implement. The two languages exhibit structural DPs that are signaled via a preposition. But they also contain other structural objects which must be equally analyzed in terms of licensing, leaving the difference from the adpositional objects unexplained. The solution proposed builds on the idea of secondary licensing on the same DP, going back to Kayne's Generalization. The conclusion is that, at least in some languages, differential objects are classes that undergo an additional licensing operation.

‘Agreement of structural obliques’parameter

“…In other Indo-Aryan languages, such as Gujarati (Patel & Grosz 2014, Irimia 2018 or Marwari illustrated below, also displaying a morphological coincidence of DOM and dative, DOM arguments do agree with the verb, as in (10a). Thus in Marwari, the internal argument agrees with the perfect, independently of whether it surfaces as a direct case (inanimate) or as a DOM (animate), signalled with the naiṃ suffix.…”

On the Nonexistence of Asymmetric DOM in Spanish

“…In fact, this type of approach has been adopted for other languages as well, such as Hindi and Sakha (see Bhatt andAnagnostopoulou 1996, Baker andVinokurova 2010). Yet many recent alternative analyses have also been proposed, by Glushan (2010), Bárány (2018), Irimia (2018), and Kalin (2018), among others.…”