Differential object marking in a dialect of Sicily

This contribution proposes an overview of the distribution ofa-marked
objects in a Romance dialect of Sicily, focusing on the relation between
a-marking and the syntactic properties of the nominal structure in object
position. The following properties are considered: type of lexical head (pro-
nouns vs. nouns); coding of the Person feature on the lexical head and its
relation with the functional head D; type of noun (proper names, kinship
nouns, other nouns); lexical realization of the determiner (D head); defi-
niteness and animacy of the object; Number. It will be shown that, in the
dialect explored,a-marking is constrained by two major restrictions: (1)
a-marking is only possible if the head D is phonetically realized, and (2)
[+human] referentsmust bea-marked.