Differential Object Marking in Corsican: Regularities and triggering factors

Abstract The paper deals with Differential Object Marking in Corsican. After a short introduction, it gives an overview of the main local triggering factors for marking direct objects in general (animacy, referentiality). It then presents the few main assumptions about Corsican DOM in the literature as well as findings of a new corpus study, based on written Corsican texts. Strong personal pronouns and proper names for human referents are consistently marked by the DOM marker à, but toponyms and metonymically used proper names are marked as well. Universal and negative quantifiers with a human denotation are also DOM-marked, whereas all other pronouns are not; thus animacy plays only a minor role in Corsican. The presence of determiners, quantifiers or numerals within nominals excludes the presence of à, irrespective of the nominals' denotation. Non-specific bare nominals are never DOM-marked, also irrespective of the nominals' denotation. The discussion then explains that the Corsican DOM is triggered much more by syntactic definiteness than animacy, a hypothesis strengthened by the most prominent morphosyntactic regularity at work in Corsican: nominals in combination with determiners and quantifiers cannot be marked by the DOM-marker à, even if they denote human beings. The complementary distribution of à and prenominal functional elements requires a further detailed syntactic analysis.