Differential marking of the ‘goal’ function in Spanish
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Abstract
The phenomenon known as ‘differential argument marking’ shows up when a clausal constituent carries a special case marker that distinguishes it from other referents filling the same functional slot, as it happens in Spanish where only some direct objects are introduced by the prepositional form a. The motivating factor most often adduced to explain this phenomenon is the ‘animacy hierarchy’, according to which the participants most likely to be differentially marked hold a semantic role that is not expected given their position in the hierarchy. This accounts for the tendency of Spanish a to target human beings cast in the role of affected ‘patients’, instead of being agents as befits them. In this article, following newly developed lines of research, we explore the instantiations of differential ‘goal’ marking in Spanish from the perspective of the typological studies that have dealt with this topic. We establish that serving as spatial landmarks is a task which the lower ranked inanimate entities are expected to perform canonically, and we analyze the formal expressions of differential marking triggered by the appearance of a person in the goal function.
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