DOM IN RAGUSA AND ITS CO-OCCURRENCE RESTRICTIONS

Recent formal research has shown that important insights into the nature of direct objects which are differentially marked come from their co- occurrence restrictions. This paper focuses on co-occurrence restrictions involving differential object marking (DOM) in the dialect of Ragusa (southeastern Sicily), in its interaction with datives and clitic doubling. It is shown that such restrictions do not have a morphological source, but a syntactic one, and are best explained by taking into account the positions in which DOM, datives and clitic doubles are licensed.