DOM in Romanian and the Referential Form-Mental Accessibility Interplay

Abstract

It is generally assumed that the form of the NP (proper name, definite NP, etc.) reflects the degree of activation of the referent introduced by it in the discourse (Givon 1981; Ariel 1988, etc.). I will show in this paper that the relation between a referring expression and the activation status associated with it plays an important role when trying to explain the distribution of pe-marking (in the sense of differential object marking) in Romanian, i.e. the pe-marked direct objects are more prominent in the discourse than their pe-unmarked counterparts.