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Historical Linguistics 2022: Selected papers from the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oxford, 1–5 August 2022
Edited by Holly Kennard, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Aditi Lahiri and Martin Maiden
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 369] 2025
► pp. 150–165

Differential object marking in early Italo-Romance and old Sardinian

 | University of Naples “Federico II”
 | University of Chieti-Pescara
This paper explores the differential marking of objects (DOM) in two southern early Italo- Romance vernaculars, namely old Sicilian and old Neapolitan, and in old Sardinian texts from two different areas, Logudoro and Arborea. We investigate the constraints on the marking of objects, whether semantic, encoding the Individuation Hierarchy, syntactic, determined by verbal valency and/or the position of the O argument in relation to the verb, or pragmatic, resulting from the topicality of the object. We show that, unlike in old Neapolitan and old Sicilian, in old Sardinian Topicality and the Person Hierarchy do not appear to play a role in the occurrence of the object marker a(d).
Keywords: Differential Object marking, Individuation hierarchy, topicality, old Sardinian, old Neapolitan, old Sicilian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Differential object marking in Italo-Romance and Sardinian
  • 3.Differential object marking in diachrony: Old Sicilian, old Neapolitan and old Sardinian
    • 3.1Old Sicilian
    • 3.2Old Neapolitan
    • 3.3Differential object marking in old Sardinian
  • 4.Conclusions
  • References
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