x
Home
Search
Topics
Almanac
Science
Nature
People
History
Society
Signup
Login
HOME
TOPICS
ALMANAC
SCIENCE
NATURE
PEOPLE
HISTORY
SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
Differential object marking
Topic Home
Discussion
0
Definition
Encyclopedia
Differential object marking (DOM) is a linguistic phenomenon that is present in more than 300 languages; the term was coined by Georg Bossong
Bossong
Bossong is a surname common to Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany and Alsace in France.- Surname history :The Bossong family is of Frankish origin. This is neither Teutonic nor French, but a separate race, almost extinct today...

. In languages where DOM is active, direct objects are divided in two different classes, depending on different meanings, and, in most DOM languages, only one of the classes receives a marker, the other being unmarked (but there are languages, like Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

, where both types of objects are marked with different endings).

Spanish

A well-known DOM language is Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

. In Spanish, direct objects that are both human and specific require a special marker (the preposition a "to"):
  • Pedro besó a Lucía. = Peter kissed Lucy. (Literally, "Peter kissed to Lucy")


Inanimate direct objects do not usually allow this marker, even if they are specific:
  • Pedro besó el retrato. = Peter kissed the picture.


Yet, some animate objects that are specific can optionally bear the marker:
  • Pedro vio (a) la gata. = Peter saw (to) the cat-FEM

Other languages

Other examples of languages with differential object marking are Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

, Copala Triqui, Khasi
Khasi language
Khasi is an Austro-Asiatic language spoken primarily in Meghalaya state in India by the Khasi people. Khasi is part of the Austroasiatic family of languages, and is fairly closely related to the Munda branch of that family, which is spoken in east&endash;central India.Although most of the 865,000...

 and Amharic
Amharic language
Amharic is a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia. It is the second most-spoken Semitic language in the world, after Arabic, and the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Thus, it has official status and is used nationwide. Amharic is also the official or working...

. In Turkish, the direct object can either have accusative case or have no (visible) case at all; when it has accusative case, it is interpreted as specific (e.g. one specific person), and otherwise it is interpreted as nonspecific (e.g. some person).

This is different from what happens in non-DOM languages, where all direct objects are uniformly marked in the same way; for instance, a language could mark all direct objects with an accusative ending (as in Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

); other language could leave all direct objects without overt marker (as in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

).

Research on DOM

Although the phenomenon has been known for a very long time, it was considered a minor quirk in a few languages until Georg Bossong, during the eighties, presented evidence of DOM in more than 300 languages.. Since then, it has become an important topic of research in grammatical theory. This is a selection of works that deal with the phenomenon:
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
Silverdale Interactive © 2024. All Rights Reserved.
 
x
OK