Differential Object Marking in Apulia: A descriptive overview

This article describes the distribution of Differential Object Marking in Puglia/Apulia (Southeast Italy), where both Upper-Southern (Pugliese/Apulian) and Extreme-Southern (Salentino) Italo-Romance varieties are spoken. This first survey on DOM in Apulia presents evidence from both the existing literature and an online questionnaire with native speakers. The latter tests a selection of referents sitting at different levels of the Definiteness Hierarchy, from personal pronouns to indefinite nouns, in order to ascertain whether specificity can(not) be considered the ultimate DOM-trigger in these varieties. In this respect, only animate direct object conveying new information are tested, whereas highly specific clitic-doubled topical structures are left for future
research. In this first attempt at mapping the fine-grained microvariation of DOM throughout the Apulian peninsula, it appears that its distribution is very limited in Salentino, being restricted to personal pronouns, while Apulian varieties display more extended DOM systems; these may be sensitive to minimally different (lexico-)semantic factors for triggering DOM at the lower levels of the Definiteness Hierarchy.