Transitivity and differential object marking

This thesis deals with direct object nouns case-marked differentially. According to the commonly assumed generalization nouns marked with ACC case are prototypical objects representing high transitivity, whereas nouns marked with non-accusative cases are not. However, such a view ignores the possibility of a much finer distinction and fails to account for empirical data from languages with rich case morphology, such as Ukrainian. Given the complexity of the phenomenon under study the main objective of our investigation is to account exhaustively for all possible instances of non-accusative case marking and case alternations on direct objects in Ukrainian trying to classify and analyze the data by specifying the factors that condition the distinction ‘accusative versus non-accusative case marking’ and by integrating the phenomenon of differential object marking (DOM) into a formal model. We present DOM as a phenomenon that, together with the phenomenon of unaccusativity, can be subsumed under a broader concept of non-accusativity (defined as inability of verbs to assign ACC case). In this context we show that in Ukrainian and French morphosyntactic case realization has semantic underpinnings and that issues related to case valuation emanate from the intersection of different phenomena – DOM and nominal incorporation, DOM and verb typology, DOM and the process of (de)transitivization, and so on. However, the (morphosyntactic) visibility of those points of intersection varies from one language to another. Generativist distinction between syntactic (abstract) and morphological cases as well as the functionalist idea that case markings can be characterized as morphemes having different functional applications constitute the basis of our analysis of data. Using the typological views of these two approaches on the category of case as guidelines in our classification of collected data, we resort to minimalist formalism. Case is treated as an uninterpretable feature and a clear distinction is drawn between two types of case valuation – case checking and case assignment. Structural cases are checked during verb-raising and inherent (lexical) cases (among which we find predicate and default cases) are assigned either by a weak (or defective) v or by (an overt or null) preposition (P) in situ.Ph