Roberta d’Alessandro (Utrecht University)

The many natures of DOM

This talk will take a syntactic angle on differential object marking (DOM) different from the one usually considered in the Romance and Indo-Aryan literature, showing DOM’s multifaceted nature. While it is true that the primary function of DOM is to mark highly salient, usually animate or definite, objects, it will be argued that DOM has many additional functions, first and foremost that of marking computational domains. It will also be shown that DOM-marking happens in the syntax, and not post-syntactically, as it interferes with primary syntactic processes such as case assignment and argument alignment.