Agentivity of the direct object and differential object marking in Iron Ossetic
Olga Tuzhik1, Natalia Serdobolskaya2
1,2Institute of Linguistics RAS
Abstract: The Ossetic language shows the phenomenon of asymmetric differential object marking. The existing research explains the variation in direct object (DO) marking in terms of animacy and referential types. However, even a detailed account of referential types and animacy classes does not predict the choice between the genitive and the nominative, especially with non-human animate DOs. Based on several pilot studies, we propose a detailed account of the factor of DO agentivity, aiming at identifying the lexical factors lying behind the distribution of the two case markers in Ossetic, in particular with non-human animates. To attain this goal, we consider lexical properties of DOs (groups of organisms, the animal’s size, its domestication), of verbs (lexical class, physical/mental and other spheres), DO characteristics in terms of proto-roles proposed by D. Dowty.
Keywords: differential object marking, semantic role, direct object, proto-role, agentivity, Ossetic
For citation: Tuzhik O., Serdobolskaya N. Agentivity of the direct object and differential object marking in Iron Ossetic. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2025. Vol. 8, iss. 1. Pp. 130–153. (In Rus.)
doi:10.37632/PI.2025.19.83.007
