A Corpus Analysis of Differential Object Marking in Beserman Udmurt
A Corpus Analysis of Differential Object Marking in Beserman Udmurt

Summary/Abstract: This paper is focused on differential object marking in Beserman Udmurt. Elicitation sessions show the relevance of referential properties of the DO for the choice between accusative and zero marking; however, for Standard Udmurt animacy has been claimed to play a more significant role. To establish the exact ranking of each parameter, we conducted an analysis of corpus data involving 10 539 sentences with 2187 DOs. With human animates, the unmarked DO is only possible with some lexical classes; with non-human animates, referential properties play the central role, as predicted by elicitation; with inanimates, the frequency of the accusative is higher among DOs with certain types of modifiers.

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