DOM and dative case

Abstract

In some languages with DOM, the exponents of DOM and dative are homophonous, e.g. in Spanish and Hindi. I argue that this pattern is not due to DOM objects and indirect objects being represented identically in syntax, but due to syncretism between accusative and dative case in these languages. This is indicated by a number of syntactic tests which group DOM objects with morphologically zero-coded direct objects, rather than with indirect objects, including nominalisation, relativisation, controlling secondary predicates, and passivisation. I suggest that languages with a ditransitive alternation between direct/indirect and primary/secondary objects provide further support for the syntactic difference of DOM and dative objects.

Partially ordered case hierarchies

“…Examples (15a-c), the passive counterparts of (3a-c), show that passivising direct objects with or without DOM is possible, (15a,b), while passivizing dative objects is not, (15c). In addition to Bárány's (2018) data in ( 15), ( 16) shows that a theme passive of a ditransitive is also possible (in contrast to the recipient passive in (15c)). ( 16) is modeled after the active examples ( 52) and ( 53) in Ormazabal & Romero (2007) in which DOM is obligatory for the direct object a los sospechosos.…”

“…Second, this approach captures the patterns of syncretism of DOM and dative case in Gujarati, Basque, and Spanish just like approaches based on total orders (see e.g. Bárány 2018), but it also captures erg=loc syncretism in Gujarati, while maintaining case contiguity (avoiding *ABA patterns) and universal containment. Finally, by "branching off" certain cases, genitives can be included in partially ordered case hierarchies in a systematic way.…”

“…In a number of languages DOM has the same morphological expression as dative case (see Manzini & Franco 2016;Bárány 2018;Irimia & Pineda 2019). In this section, I discuss Gujarati, Basque and Spanish (in this order).…”

“…This maintains case contiguity and avoids an *ABA pattern, but crucially only because there are two accusatives and datives. Part of the empirical motivation for positing two accusatives and datives comes from differential object marking (DOM) in Spanish (Torrego 1998;Aissen 2003;Cuervo 2003;Leonetti 2004;2008;López 2012;Fábregas 2013;Bárány 2018;Pineda 2020) among many others), where direct objects alternate between zero-marking and being expressed with the marker a, which also serves as a dative marker. Neither is syncretic with the genitive preposition de 'of'.…”

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.…”