The accusative morpheme -(y)i in Turkish and differential object marking in Romanian
The accusative morpheme -(y)i in Turkish and differential object marking in Romanian

Summary/Abstract: Romanian differentially marked object DPs and object DPs carrying the accusative morphological marker -(y)i in Turkish pattern alike in that they acquire a specific (D-linked / covert partitive) meaning. The semantic contribution of specificity as D-linking is to link the denotation of the (specific) DP in question to previously established referents. The referent of the specific DP is thus a subset of (or stands in some recoverable relation to) a familiar object. The anaphoric interpretation seems to find a justification if one considers that the doubled / dislocated DP moves out of VP and into SpecVP (the VP phase edge), which is a position where, according to Lopez (2009) pragmatic rules apply. The feature [+a] is assigned to SpecvP, triggering the anaphoric interpretation of DOM-ed DPs. The doubled / dislocated DP does move out of the VP, as pointed out by the existence of inverse binding effects (Cornilescu 2006). Lastly, we formalize the semantic contribution of differentially marked DPs with the aid of DRT. The underlying idea of this formalization was that the denotation of the direct object DP is related to the denotation of the clitic pronoun by means of a subset-set relation.

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