Open AccessDOM AND NON-CANONICAL WORD ORDER IN ROMANCE: THE CASE OF GALICIAN
Author(s) -
Brian M. Gravely
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
bucharest working papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2392-8093
pISSN - 2069-9239
DOI - 10.31178/bwpl.22.2.1
Subject(s) - word order , animacy , linguistics , object (grammar) , computer science , variation (astronomy) , romance languages , order (exchange) , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , philosophy , physics , astrophysics , finance , economics
In this article, I investigate the link between VSO-VOS orders and differential object marking (DOM) via novel data from Galician. I present an analysis that sheds light on what may be required for a language to license DOM via movement, a requirement once thought necessary for licensing DOM that has recently been discredited on the basis of an overwhelming amount of cross-linguistic data (cf. Kalin 2018). I also show evidence for the variation regarding featural specification of DPs that must be differentially marked, adding to the highly variable factors that contribute to the appearance of DOM on nominal objects in natural language. Focusing on full DP objects, I conclude that licensing DOM in Galician is predicated on both the level of animacy of postverbal nominals and object shift in VOS configurations.