“Diacronia” bibliometric database (BDD)
Title:

The Discourse Structuring Potential of DOM, the Case of Indefinite and Definite Direct Objects in Romanian

Authors:
Publication: Revue roumaine de linguistique, LVIII (4), p. 439-456
p-ISSN:0035-3957
Publisher:Editura Academiei
Place:București
Year:
Abstract:This paper investigates pe-marking of postverbal human direct objects in Romanian as an instance of differential object marking (DOM). Specifically, we compare the conditions under which unmodified definite noun phrases are pe-marked with the conditions under which indefinite noun phrases are pe-marked. We argue that pe-marking does not only signal the referential property of specificity for indefinites and referentiality for definites, but that it also signals the discourse-pragmatic property of Discourse Structuring Potential (DSP). DSP is reflected by (i) a higher likelihood of subsequent mention (Givón 1983, Ariel 2001, Arnold 2010) and (ii) a higher topic shift potential (Givón 1983). Discussing the findings from different sentence-continuation experiments we conducted, we argue that pe-marked unmodified definite noun phrases and pe-marked indefinite noun phrases show a higher DSP than their unmarked counterparts.
Key words:Differential object marking, specificity, Discourse Structuring Potential, discourse prominence, sentence-continuation task
Language: English
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Citations to this publication: 1

2Alexandra Cornilescu, Anca DinuAdjectives and SpecificityRRL, LIX (1), 103-1282014pdf
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References in this publication: 2

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