This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the origins, development, and stabilization of differential object marking (DOM) in Romanian. DOM, a means by which a grammar distinguishes between objects based on semantic features such as animacy or definiteness, has been a fruitful area of research in syntax, historical linguistics, and typology. In this volume, Virginia Hill and Alexandru Mardale demonstrate that Romanian DOM reflects a typological mix of Balkan and Romance patterns, and is in fact composed of three distinct mechanisms. Their analysis of these mechanisms reveals that DOM triggers in Romanian are located in the nominal domain, in contrast to languages such as Spanish, where they are located in the verbal domain. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted in the volume sheds light on existing typologies of DOM, particularly in relation to the variation observed in the merging location of the DOM particle and of the doubling pronominal clitic.

Virginia Hill's profile page

Alexandru Mardale's profile page

Virginia Hill is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Brunswick - Saint John. She has published extensively on Romanian diachronic syntax, particularly on clause and verb syntax, the emergence of the supine and of the subjunctive, and the diachrony of differential object marking. She also works on the syntax of speech acts and vocatives in a range of a languages. She is the author of Vocatives: How Syntax Meets with Pragmatics (Brill, 2014), and Verb Movement and Clause Structure in Old Romanian (with Gabriela Alboiu; OUP, 2016), and editor of Formal Approaches to DPs in Old Romanian (Brill, 2015).

Alexandru Mardale is Assistant Professor of Romanian Language and Linguistics at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris. His work explores the synchrony and diachrony of differential object marking in Romanian from a comparative perspective, as well as the morphosyntax and semantics of functional prepositions in Romance and the use of the subjunctive in Balkan Languages. He is the co-editor, with Petros Karatsareas, of Differential Object Marking and Language Contact (Brill, 2020) and, with Silvana Montrul, of The Acquisition of Differential Object Marking (Benjamins, 2020).