La marcatura differenziale dell'oggetto in siciliano antico

Abstract

Differential object marking (DOM), also known as Prepositional Accusative in Romance Linguistics, is a marked variation in the realisation of the direct object which codes the direct object via a preposition. As in many languages that have a DOM-system, also in Romance the phenomenon is regulated by semantic features of the referents, such as animacy, definiteness and specificity (bossing 1985, Croft 1988). Animate, definite or specific objects receive an object marker, whereas inanimate, indefinite or non-specific objects remain unmarked. After discussing the main theoretical approaches to the phenomenon, I will analyse DOM in Old Sicilian, based primarily on a corpus of data from the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) textual database, a corpus of early Italian containing also vernacular texts prior to 1375. I will attempt to show that DOM emerges in pragmatically and semantically marked contexts, namely with personal pronouns in left dislocations. I will then argue that DOM-system in Old Sicilian is motivated by the need for signaling that these objects are atypical 1) at the information structure level insofar as they are primary topics and 2) at the semantic level, because they are high on the animacy and definiteness hierarchies. Subsequently, I will show that in Modern Sicilian the construction has been extended to non-topical objects which share features of topic-worthiness. As a conclusion, I will argue that DOM signals iconically the non-obviousness of the pragmatic and semantic properties of the marked objects (Croft 1988: 174), which are more salient at the perceptual and cognitive level (cf. Givon 1985: 206), as confirmed by the low frequency of animate and definite objects in transitive clauses.