Gradiente di transitività e codifica dell'oggetto. Dall'accusativo preposizionale al partitivo

The purpose of the present paper is to account for the fact that two fundamental strategies of object case marking (i.e., accusative vs. partitive, prepositional accusative vs. Ø) are mutually exclusive in European languages. We show that a crucial role is played by object affectedness, which correlates with the degree of telicity of the verb phrase. The so-called prepositional accusative marks the object of [+prototypical] transitive constructions and signals the contrast between a high degree of object affectedness and a high degree of the agentivity of the entity that the object noun refers to. The partitive case, instead, marks the object of [–prototypical] transitive constructions and encodes the low affectedness of the object, independently of the properties of the extralinguistic referent. These two strategies are not cognitively incompatible, but redundant: this is the reason why they tend to be mutually exclusive. Furthermore, an explanation is provided of why partitive objects cannot become subjects of passive constructions.