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The main goal of this article is to examine in detail an area of the grammar where standard Romanian, a Balkan Sprachbund language of the Romance phylum, and the Romance dialects of Southern Italy (here we used the dialect of Ragusa, in South-East Sicily) appear to converge, namely differential object marking (DOM). When needed, additional observations from non-Romance Balkan languages were also taken into account. Romanian and Ragusa use a prepositional strategy for differential marking, in a conjunctive system of semantic specifications, of which one is normally humanness/animacy. However, despite these unifying traits, this paper also focuses on important loci of divergence, some of which have generally been ignored in the previous literature. For example, Ragusa does not easily permit clitic doubling and shows differences in terms of binding possibilities and positions of direct objects, two traits that set it aside from both Romanian and non-Romance Balkan languages; additionally, as opposed to Romanian, its prepositional DOM strategy cannot override humanness/animacy. The comparative perspective we adopt allow us to obtain an in-depth picture of differential marking in the Balkan and Romance languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And third, while the customary trend has been that of studying direct and indirect objects separately, the book examines the two in parallel, focusing on their commonalities and differences across all periods of Romanian. By contrast, Old and Modern Romanian are similar to Romance languages in that animacy is a relevant parameter and a prepositional marker (DOM-p) is employed for differentially marking direct objects. Similarly, non-Romance languages of the Balkan Sprachbund use clitic doubling as a means to differentially mark both direct and indirect objects based on specificity, referentiality, and definiteness. It examines both direct and indirect objects, with exemplification of each of the three strategies: CD (indirect and direct objects), DOM-p (direct objects), CD+DOM-p (direct objects). [Extracted from the article]

An outstanding question in current studies concerns the status of Romance SE that does not obviously mark reflexivity or anticausativity. This paper signals the presence of such constructions in Old and Modern Romanian, where SE occurs with unergative verbs and qualifies as pleonastic according to traditional grammars (i.e., it makes no difference for the truth conditions or for the argument structure). The main argument is that such constructions are actually instances of differential subject marking (DSM) in Romanian, and that the semantic triggers and the underlying configuration resemble those that occur with differential object marking (DOM) in this language. In terms of theoretical contribution, this analysis (i) widens the cross-linguistic inventory of DSM patterns, by adding Clitic Doubling; (ii) confirms the predictions of recent studies that there could be similarity rather than opposition between DOM and DSM contexts; (iii) shows the possibility of re-allocating the reflexive pronoun SE to other configurations besides (an instance of) verb reflexivization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on object experiencer (OE) causatives in Romanian, identifying a less discussed pattern of variation. The results of a pilot study indicate that for a class of speakers such predicates are not grammatical with an indefinite object, if the latter is not differentially marked. A second class of speakers can accept unmarked objects but only if access to direct evidence of the event is available. As these restrictions set aside OE causatives from physical causatives, a non-trivial question refers to the nature of this difference. An analysis is proposed that revolves around a pragmatic distinction between OE verbs and physical causatives. More precisely, insights put forward by pragmatic investigations of OE verbs have consolidated the observation, which we follow here, that these types of predicates presuppose a perception event in which the object of the asserted event is a perceiver. We further propose that the perception presupposition can be established in the context either by differential object marking (DOM), which has an independently motivated sentience feature, or by direct evidence. Subsequently, we also show that an analysis along these lines gives better results when addressing these types of splits against more general interactions between causatives, inanimate subjects and DOM; under previous accounts, the facts under discussion are either unpredicted or not straightforward to derive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]