Affectedness — usually construed as a persistent change in an event participant — has been implicated in argument realization, lexical aspect, transitivity, and various syntactic operations. However, it is rarely given a precise, independentlymotivated definition. Rather, it is often defined intuitively or diacritically, or reduced to the properties it is meant to explain, especially lexical as...

This paper offers an affectedness-based analysis of the Chinese excessive resultative construction, which typically describes events of affectedness consisting of two participants, a theme participant and a scale participant measuring the degree of affectedness. In such an event, the theme participant is created or affected according to a beforehand prescribed value (e1) on a scale, while the p...

In this study we investigate the impact of affectedness on the diachronic development of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish. DOM in Spanish synchronically depends on (i) the referential features of the direct object, such as animacy and referentiality, and (ii) the semantics of the verb. Several studies have also shown that the diachronic development of DOM proceeds along the Animacy ...

People sometimes report feeling “totally” different (complete affectedness) and that “they’ll never be the same again” (continual affectedness) after negative events. It’s been proposed that complete, and continual negative effects characterize contamination or impurity. Meanwhile, whether impurity is a legitimate moral domain apart from harm has been debated in moral psychology. We address the...

Abstract This article explores the relationship between affectedness and Differential Object Marking (DOM) of indefinite direct objects in Turkish Uzbek. We argue that distribution DOM two Turkic languages is determined by objects’ specificity animacy as nominal semantic properties, a verbal property associated with object. provide original empirical evidence from forced-choice studies investig...

This paper discusses a number of problems associated with the widely accepted analysis of differential object marking (DOM) as reflecting the semantic markedness of highly individuated (definite and/or animate) direct objects. Firstly, such an account is in conflict with established notions of transitivity which take a typical object to be highly affected, since affectedness can be shown to cor...