DOM in Kodava takk: a complex interaction among multiple factors

This paper presents novel data from Kodava takk (Dravidian), also known as Coorgi, which exhibits the well-attested syntactic phenomenon of Differential Object Marking (DOM). Crosslinguistically, objects which are differentially marked tend to be associated with features such as specificity and/or definiteness, humanness, animacy, or a combination of these. Well- known examples of specificity-driven DOM include Turkish (von Heusinger and Kornfilt 2005) and Senaya (Kalin 2018), whereas direct objects in Spanish (Ormazabal & Romero 2013) and Hindi (Dayal 2011, Bhatt & Anagnostopolou 1996) receive differential marking on the grounds of animacy/humanness and specificity. As will be illustrated, this phenomenon is most definitely present in Coorgi, as the accusative case-marker does not always appear on direct objects. However, on the surface, there is no clear-cut featural split between objects which do and do not receive this case-marker. Instead, this differential marking is triggered by a complex interaction of multiple factors: animacy, specificity, number, humanness, and inherent lexical properties of verbs. This paper outlines the interactions which derive Differential Object Marking in Coorgi and offers a formal analysis to capture the empirical facts, which modifies Kalin’s (2018) account where DOM is a result of nominal licensing. This paper not only provides complex novel data from an understudied and endangered language, but also deepens our understanding of this crosslinguistic phenomenon, and calls into question the role grammatical Number plays in Differential Object Marking.&nbsp

Negation, Imperatives, and Agreement in Coorgi

This paper presents novel data from a severely understudied Dravidian language Coorgi showing that one of the negation morphemes in the language (-le negation) cannot occur with imperatives or with agreement. We show that another form of negation, -at, on the other hand, can occur with both. The paper explores possible reasons behind this pattern, and we propose that this distributional difference between -le and -at stems from a difference in their syntactic position. Namely, we argue that -le is head-negation (head of NegP), while -at is adjunct negation occupying an adjunct position (SpecVP). We show that this syntactic difference between the two types of negation in Coorgi places the observed patterns within a robust cross-linguistic generalization: negation is banned in imperative contexts in (some) languages where negation morphemes are syntactically heads, while negation is allowed in imperative contexts in languages where the negation morphemes are adjuncts (Zeijlstra 2004, Bošković 2004, 2012). We thus argue that the patterns of the distribution of negation in Coorgi is due to a cross-linguistically attested pattern of head Neg blocking Affix- Hopping. The proposed analysis provides an insight into another pattern of the distribution of negation in the language – namely, its cooccurrence or the lack thereof with agreement morphology