Canonical and non-canonical marking of core arguments in European languages. A typological approach.

In the present paper, we show that: 1) the so-called "prepositional object" is related to past participle agreement phenomena and auxiliary selection in compound tenses; 2) the properties of the predicate and the properties of the referent of the object noun co-occur in the prepositional object selection. Data from Spanish, Sardinian, Sicilian, Calabrian, Maltese and Romanian are examined. We show that the same parameters govern the distribution of this special case of differential object marking in all the languages that are considered; these parameters are: 1) object affectedness (and, consequently, verb telicity), 2) object agentivity, 3) object individuation. Each parameter corresponds to a graded category, according to which verb phrases (or clauses) can be ranked and, consequently, objects are more or less likely to be prepositional (= non-canonically marked) or non-prepositional (= canonically marked).