Case Marking in Turkish Indefinite Object Constructions

INDEFINITE NPs AND PE-MARKING IN ROMANIAN

It is well known that Romanian is a language which marks its direct objects differentially by means of the particle pe (Niculescu 1965, Chiriacescu 2007, von Heusinger & Onea 2008). As in other Romance languages, direct object case marking is obligatory for some objects, optional for others and excluded for a third set, whereas this phenomenon is mostly accompanied by clitic doubling. The facto...

Nominal head-marking constructions: two case studies from Luiseño

Turkish Indefinites and Accusative Marking

The paper addresses the issue of the effects of overt accusative (Acc) vs. zero (∅) marking on the interpretation of indefinite direct objects in Turkish. Previous attacks on the issue came up with various associations of the overt accusative case with certain semantic and pragmatic categories. A representative list goes as follows: Discourse-linking (Nilsson 1985; Enç 1991; Zidani-Eroğlu 1997)...

Specificity and Object Marking: the Case of Spanish a

1. Preliminaries It is well known that several languages use certain grammatical devices as object markers that are in some sense associated to the Specific / Non-Specific distinction. Spanish is one of them, and Romanian, Turkish, Persian or Hindi are frequently mentioned as other representative cases of the general phenomenon which, following Georg Bossong’s proposal, we call Differential Obj...

Prosodic marking of topic constructions in Mandarin Chinese

This study examines the prosodic marking of topic constructions in Mandarin Chinese. The findings suggest that, even though on the surface there are prosodic markings that differentiate topics from comments, the difference is the product of the prosodic phrasing, coupled with the declination and final lowering, in that a topic construction is usually decomposed into to two prosodic constituents...