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 factors that are considered to be the main triggers of the marked direct object form are animacy, definiteness and specificity. DOM-marking starts at the more prominent part of these scales covering areas of different length (Farkas 1978, Dobrovie-Sorin 1994, von Heusinger & Onea 2008). So, whether a direct object will be marked or not depends on the amount of features united in the object in cause. Up to this point, the literature (Chiriacescu 2007, Stark& Sora 2008, etc.), has focused on the development and on the parameters licensing DOM in Romanian, leaving aside certain constructions that could not be accounted for by means of the above mentioned factors. These constructions involve direct objects realized as post-verbal unmodified definite or indefinite nominal phrases. In such cases, both the marked and the unmarked direct object constructions coexist, whereby the difference in meaning between the two forms is subtle and difficult to analyze. In the present paper I will focus on direct objects realized as indefinite nominal phrases which involve not clearly explained alternations between a pe-marked and an unmarked form. The examples (1a) and (1b) illustrate this variation. The context sentence (A) can be continued either as in (1a) where the indefinite direct object is pe-marked, or as in (1b) where the object appears unmarked: