[Lingtyp] Differential Object Marking and Language Contact

[Pier Marco Bertinetto]

Although very marginal, I would like to point out an example of DOM in
Italian.
It is well known that in the southern varieties, DOM is very frequent in
the colloquial language, but the phenomenon I am describing here can be
observed with speakers of the standard variety which should be immune to it.
Consider verbs such as *colpire* 'strike', *sorprendere* 'surprise' and the
like. They are transitive, as one can observe in:
- *La notizia colpì me più di ogni altro*
  'the news struck me more than anyone else'
With clitic climbing, you have:
- *La notizia mi colpì molto*
  'the news struck me a lot'.
The different form (*me*/*mi*) owns to the contrast between a strong
pronoun (*me*) and the corresponding clitic. Admittedly, *mi* is ambiguous,
because it can express both a direct object and a dative argument. In the
sentence above, at any rate, *mi* clearly expresses a direct object.
Several Standard Italian speakers (not me, for what it matters) nowadays
say sentences such as:
- *A me colpisce / sorprende che* ...
  to me (it) strikes / surprises that ...
using a DOM strategy. It is possible that the formal ambiguity of *mi* has
had a role in the development of this construction, but this should not
detract from the fact that *colpire* and *sorprendere *are transitive verbs.

Pier Marco


Il giorno mer 6 nov 2024 alle ore 21:04 Inbal Mayo via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> ha scritto:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> I hope this message finds you well. I am reaching out to request your
> assistance with a survey I am conducting as part of my MA thesis on
> languages that have acquired Differential Object Marking (DOM) due to
> language contact.
> So far, I have identified a few well-attested cases, for example in the
> Tibeto-Burman language family, particularly the Kiranti languages (Ebert
> 2003; Bickel 2003, etc.), as well as a few other cases such as Afrikaans
> (den Besten 2000), Basque (Rodríguez-Ordóñez 2020), and Paraguayan Guaraní
> (Bittar 2023). However, I have also encountered some cases that are less
> clear. For instance, in the Semitic language family (specifically Maltese
> (Döhla 2016)) DOM has been proposed as a contact-induced feature, though
> this relies on the  assumption that the language’s ancestors did not
> originally have DOM. From what I understand, this assumption is under some
> contention.
> Additional problematic cases are found in the Indo-Iranian languages. For
> example, DOM systems in Hindi and Persian are hypothesized to be due to
> language contact (Montaut 2018 and Paul 2018 respectively), but according
> to other sources DOM is extremely widespread in Indo-Aryan languages
> (Schikowski 2013, which focuses on Nepali and relies on additional
> descriptions of Indo-Aryan languages), which would make it is less likely
> that this feature is contact-induced.
>
> I would greatly appreciate any additional references or insights that
> could shed light on these case studies, as well as information on other
> languages where DOM is theorized to have developed due to language contact.
>
> Thank you very much for your time!
> Best regards,
> Inbal Mayo
>
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> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
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>


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