Argument Marking in Romance

Abstract

The loss of inflectional case marking in the passage from Latin to the Romance languages was accompanied by a profusion of analytic strategies of argument marking in Romance. The phenomenon of analytic marking of grammatical dependencies of arguments on their head is not limited to the usage of functional prepositions but also involves the emergence of non-prepositional freestanding markers (some of which take part in mixed, analytic and synthetic, marking). Furthermore, Romance languages display complex alternative strategies of encoding grammatical relations (differential object marking and clitic doubling), the emergence of which is unquestionably related to the changes in the system of case marking and to the subtle move away from dependent marking to head marking. This article represents an extensive survey of the non-inflectional markers (prepositional constructions marking genitive, partitive, and dative relations; non-prepositional freestanding markers; mixed marking) as well as of some more complex alternative strategies of encoding grammatical relations (differential object marking and clitic doubling), placing emphasis on the markers themselves and on their distribution. From a broader historical perspective, the emergence and consolidation of the non-inflectional strategies of marking grammatical dependencies are reflexes of the change in the head-directionality parameter (head-final in Latin to head-initial in Romance), besides the transition from dependent-marking to head-marking. The article looks both at standard Romance varieties and at dialects and places emphasis on issues less explored in the reference literature (e.g., the non-prepositional freestanding markers found in the historical dialects of Romanian or the phenomenon of mixed marking, where inflectional and non-inflectional markers co-occur within the same construction).