On a-marking of object topics in the Italian left periphery

Abstract

Standard Italian is known not to mark lexical direct objects through use of a preposition.1 This is in contrast with southern varieties, in which lexical direct objects are typically introduced by preposition a, as an instance of the Differential Object Marking/DOM phenomenon, found in several languages (Manzini and Franco 2016 for recent assessment of the phenomenon). In the closely related standard Spanish, to mention a well-known case, lexical direct objects are introduced by the same preposition a, with constraints depending on the nature of the direct object (such as e.g., its specificity and animacy). Thus, speakers of standard Italian judge sentences like (1) as ungrammatical, or else they typically attribute to these sentences a clear “southern” flavor: