GENITIVE/‘OF’ ARGUMENTS IN DOM CONTEXTS

Manzini and Franco (2016) argue that in many languages, Differential Object Marking (DOM) of highly ranked DPs takes the form of embedding under the same part-whole ⊆ predicate which introduces goal arguments; therefore DOM arguments surface as datives. Since genitive arguments are introduced by the partwhole or possession predicates ⊆ as well, they predict that there are languages encoding DOM by the same morphemes as genitives (section 1). In section 2, we briefly review languages which externalize DOMs and genitives by the same morphology, leaving out datives (e.g. Slavic, Ossetic, Finnish). In section 3, we discuss what we argue is an instance of genitive DOM in prepositional contexts in Italian, whereby highly ranked referents (personal pronouns) are preceded by di ‘of’ whereas other DPs are embedded bare.