Asymmetric DOM in Coordination: A Problem for Movement-Based Approaches

1 Introduction

Differential object marking (DOM) is a common crosslinguistic phenomenon whereby overt case marking on objects surfaces only on a subset of objects, namely, those high in definiteness, specificity, and/or animacy (e.g., Comrie 1979, Croft 1988, Bossong 1991, Enç 1991, Aissen 2003, de Swart 2007). In Spanish, for example, simplifying somewhat, overt case marking of objects (boldfaced throughout the squib) is required when the object is specific and animate and banned when the object is nonspecific or inanimate.

(1)

In this squib, we set out to (a) introduce new findings revealing that many DOM languages allow asymmetric marking in coordinations when conjuncts are mismatched in terms of animacy/definiteness, and (b) show that these findings are extremely problematic for many popular (broadly) Minimalist accounts of DOM, namely, those that derive DOM via movement (e.g., de Hoop 1996, Torrego 1998, Woolford 1999, Bhatt 2007, Rodríguez-Mondoñedo 2007, Baker and Vinokurova 2010, Richards 2010, López 2012, Ormazabal and Romero 2013), at least insofar as these accounts are intended to be general accounts of DOM and/or apply to the languages that allow asymmetric marking.

The squib is organized as follows. In section 2, we outline two movement analyses of DOM. In section 3, we discuss why such accounts predict asymmetric DOM in coordinations to be impossible, and in section 4, we show that many DOM languages do in fact allow asymmetric DOM. In section 5, we explore whether movement analyses can be salvaged (for languages that allow asymmetric DOM), and we argue that they cannot. In section 6, we offer preliminary conclusions.

2 Prominent Movement Analyses of DOM

Movement-based accounts of DOM take raising of the object out of VP as in (2) to be a necessary (though perhaps not sufficient) ingredient of DOM.

(2)

Here we lay out two specific accounts, which stand in as instantiations of more general types of accounts: (a) accounts in which movement of the object is to a Case position (e.g., Bhatt 2007, Rodríguez-Mondoñedo 2007, López 2012, Ormazabal and Romero 2013), and (b) accounts in which raising of the object feeds case competition with the subject (e.g., Baker and Vinokurova 2010, Baker 2014a, Levin and Preminger 2015). Across movement-based accounts, a common component of the motivation for movement is that the object must raise out of VP to escape existential closure (Diesing 1992).

The first type of account is exemplified by Rodríguez-Mondoñedo 2007. Rodríguez-Mondoñedo argues that transitive v in Spanish can only check [number] features, and so can only assign Case to an object that is ϕ-incomplete, in other words, one with only [number]. Case assigned by v has a null spell-out. If an object has a [person] feature (carried by animate specific nominals), then the object is ϕ-complete and cannot have its Case checked by v. Such an object thus needs to raise (ultimately, to Spec, DatP) to check its Case. Since the projection it checks Case with is DatP, the marking is dative a.

The second type of account is exemplified by Baker and Vinokurova 2010. Looking at the Turkic language Sakha, Baker and Vinokurova argue that DOM is derived by movement out of VP, which is a phase, into the higher CP phase. Since the subject is also in this higher phase (and is so far caseless), the object enters into case competition with the subject (Marantz 1991) and so, per the case assignment rules of Sakha, receives dependent accusative case. Unlike in Spanish, this case is not syncretic with dative; rather, its exponent is a unique accusative form, -(n)I. Objects that do not raise remain caseless.

A preliminary problem with taking movement to be a general property of DOM is that not all DOM languages have (at least obvious) syntactic movement of the marked object; see, for example, Hebrew (Shlonsky 1997), Kannada (Lidz 2006), and Northeastern Neo-Aramaic languages (Kalin 2018). However, it might be that there is movement in these languages but it is not detectable with the normal tests...