Chapter On a-marking of object topics in the Italian left periphery

Abstract

Standard Italian is known not to mark lexical direct objects through use of a prep-osition.1 This is in contrast with southern varieties, in which lexical direct objects are typically introduced by preposition a, as an instance of the Differential Object Marking/DOM phenomenon, found in several languages (Manzini and Franco 2016 for recent assessment of the phenomenon). In the closely related standard Spanish, to mention a well-known case, lexical direct objects are introduced by the same preposition a, with constraints depending on the nature of the direct object (such as e.g., its specificity and animacy).