Role-semantic parameters for DOM in Italian
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Alessia Cassarà [1] ; Sophie Mürmann [1]
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[1] Universität Köln
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- Localización: Differential Object Marking in Romance: the third wave / coord. por Johannes Kabatek, Philipp Obrist, Albert Wall, 2021, ISBN 978-3-11-064656-6, págs. 65-102
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Italian is said to be a no-DOM language. Some studies have shown, however, that under certain conditions occurrences of DOM-marking can be found in the colloquial spoken variety (Berretta 1989; 1991; Belletti 2018). In a corpus of spontaneous speech of Italian collected by Berretta 1991, DOM seems to appear with verbs associated with “non-prototypical objects”, such as objectexperiencer psych-verbs (e.g. preoccupare ‘worry’, spaventare ‘frighten’) or interaction verbs (e.g. salutare ‘greet’, chiamare ‘call’). While Berretta’s study provides an accurate description of such cases, we investigated possible motivations for the marker to appear. We postulate a hypothesis in terms of role-semantic parameters, based on Dowty’s (1991) proto-role model, assuming that the appearance of the a-marker is triggered by the proto-agent properties that specific verb types assign to their objects. In order to assess a possible effect of agentivity on DOM in Italian, we carried out an acceptability judgment task in which verb type and NP type of the object have been manipulated. As our results show, verbs with an agentive object are more likely to be accepted with DOM than objects bearing exclusively patient properties. Such hypothesis seems to hold particularly for object-experiencer psych-verbs, where the proto-agent property sentience is entailed for the direct object rather than only presupposed as in the case of interaction verbs. At the same time, the interaction between verb semantics, referential and syntactic prominence proves to be very relevant, suggesting that DOM in Italian is far from being grammaticalized. Overall, this study is a further contribution supporting the role-semantic model for DOM.
