What markedness marks: the markedness problem with direct objects

This paper discusses a number of problems associated with the widely accepted analysis of differential object marking (DOM) as reflecting the semantic markedness of highly individuated (definite and/or animate) direct objects. Firstly, such an account is in conflict with established notions of transitivity which take a typical object to be highly affected, since affectedness can be shown to correlate with a high degree of individuation. Secondly, the notion of markedness reversal, which is employed as a means of providing a unified account of differential marking of subjects and of objects (e.g. Aissen, 2000), cannot unproblematically be applied to the kinds of oppositions typically involved in DOM. Finally, the predictions made for subject marking only partly correspond to attested linguistic data. An alternative analysis is proposed which takes accusative case-marking to be a marker of a high degree of affectedness in objects. By exploiting the association between affectedness and a high degree of individuation (definiteness/animacy), such an analysis can account for the DOM data, while avoiding the difficulties inherent to the approach which takes individuated objects to be semantically marked.