accusative + analytical DO markers

[Giorgio Iemmolo]

Dear all,

as far as I know, the co-occurrence of two accusative markers seems to be extremely rare cross-linguistically.  If we exclude cases in which an accusative marker, like "a" is Romance, occurs in conjunction with accusative pronominal forms, the only cases I am aware of are the following ones:

1. Huangshui Chinese, where the older differential object marker pa (cognate with the well-known Mandarin Chinese ba) is being gradually supplanted by another marker "xa", which most of the time  seems to co-occur with pa. Interestingly, xa is the general topic marker in Huangshui Chinese (Dede 2007).

2. Classical Armenian, where the differential object marker z- occurs with accusative plural marking (even though the situation seems to be rather fluid, see Meillet 1903: 90-91);

3. Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopian), which shows both the preposition "la-" as a differential object marker, plus an accusative ending -a which survives from the old Semitic system. 

If you're looking for cases where the two markers do not have to co-occur, then it is probably easier to find more examples like Biloxi (cf. Matthew Dryer's Daniel Hieber's emails), which might indeed be a case of DOM where a topic marker was reanalysed as a differential object marker with direct objects, a fact that doesn't seem to be as uncommon as one might think. 

As for the co-occurrence of accusative case-marking with indexation, such as clitic doubling in Romance. I would be very cautious to compare the two and consider them alike: when historical data is available, we often see that the two constructions, albeit closely related in terms of governing parameters, do not develop at the same time. Also from a pure synchronic perspective, the overlap between the two is not complete even in languages which are usually taken as chief examples of such a co-occurrence, e.g. different Spanish varieties.  
All the very best,

Giorgio

Il giorno 27-mag-2013, alle ore 19:23, Daniel W. Hieber ha scritto:

> Sergej, Matthew,
> 
> I just wanted to pass along this note from David Kaufmann, PhD candidate at the University of Kansas, regarding the postpositions in Biloxi, a language he's done some work with. Something to consider when looking at the Biloxi data.
> 
> best,
> 
> Danny
> 
> Omnis habet sua dona dies. ~ Martial
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> From: David Kaufman <dvkanth2010 at gmail.com>
>> Date: May 27, 2013, 1:05:35 PM EDT
>> To: "Daniel W. Hieber" <dwhieb at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: accusative + analytical DO markers
>> 
>> Thanks, Danny!  Here is my response:
>> 
>> Dear Sergej and Matthew:
>> 
>> I'm not convinced that yaNka(N) is a postposition in Biloxi.  It may simply be the -yaN topic marker (definite article) + kaN switch reference (different subject/topic) marker.  Einaudi hadn't done a great job figuring out all of the supposed suffixes in Biloxi.  The only sure way I know of marking "accusative" or direct object "case" in Biloxi is via the -kaN or -k suffix.  But even this is seldom used in Biloxi texts, so I'm always hesitant to call it a "case," since it appears to be subject to speaker preference (perhaps stylistic) and not required as are cases in, for instance, Russian or Latin.
>> 
>> David Kaufman
>> University of Kansas
>> dvkanth2010 at gmail.com


--
Giorgio Iemmolo
Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Universität Zürich
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e-mail: giorgio.iemmolo at uzh.ch
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