Specificity and Object Marking: the Case of Spanish a

نویسندگان

  • MANUEL LEONETTI
  • Olga Fernández
چکیده

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 Object Marking (DOM). My aim in this paper will be that of determining what is the particular contribution of DOM to utterance interpretation in Spanish, and how specificity is related to it. I would like to begin by presenting some basic assumptions on the Semantics / Pragmatics interface and on the notion of specificity, to concentrate later on the analysis of the Spanish prepositional accusative. I intend to show that, although the correlation between the accusative marker and specificity is far from clear, basically because animacy –and not specificityis the dominant trigger for DOM in Spanish, a number of facts still indicate that the prepositional accusative tends to be associated with specific readings, in a way which is not unrelated to what happens in scrambling and clitic doubling constructions. Far from deriving from some [+ specific] feature inherent in the meaning of a, such facts can be shown to be a consequence of a different basic semantic feature that should allow us to bring together most of the grammatical phenomena that are sensitive to specificity. Some closing remarks on specificity in grammatical structure will sum up the discussion. I will try to present the general hypothesis that when natural languages encode specificity, they do it inside DP structure only (basically by means of determiners), and not in other positions; as a consequence, other alleged specificity markers outside DP structure are actually modality indicators or information structure markers. In these cases, the markers simply force a specific reading in certain DPs without encoding specificity themselves. Clarifying this issue should allow us to have a more precise view of the role of specificity in grammatical systems. The basic assumptions are as follows: a) First, I assume Sperber and Wilson’ s distinction between linguistic meaning (logical form, in Relevance-theoretic terms) and explicatures as two different semantic levels (Sperber and

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تاریخ انتشار 2003