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Abstract
Case marking of the object is often claimed to be driven specifically by two referential properties of the object, animacy and definiteness. Data from 744 languages, however, provide typological evidence that there is no universal preference for object case marking to be driven by these properties, but at the same time provide strong evidence that object case marking tends to be restricted in some way rather than be generalized across all objects. I argue that the independence of object case marking from these two semantic-pragmatic properties may be explained by the instability of their relationship, and that economy provides a feasible explanation for restricting case marking to only some objects.
Keywords: Animacy; areality; case marking; definiteness; Differential Object Marking; economy; stability; typology
Published Online: 2014-3-13
Published in Print: 2014-3-1
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
