La codificazione degli attanti nel Mediterraneo romanzo: accordo del participio e marcatura dell'oggetto

In languages like Italian, past participle agreement is obligatory with passive and unaccusative subjects (e.g., Italian: la torta è mangiata da Mario "the cake is eaten by Mario", Maria è arrivata "Maria has arrived"), but optional with objects of highly telic verbs (e.g., Italian: Chicco ha chiusa la porta "Chicco has closed the door"). In the present paper, we discuss past participle agreement phenomena in relation to different strategies of differential object marking. We show that past participle agreement is a strategy to encode prototypical undergoer arguments; whereas, differential object marking – specifically, the prepositional direct object (e.g., Spanish: Maria ha matado a Juan "Maria has killed Juan") – is a strategy to encode non-prototypical undergoer arguments, that is, the arguments whose inherent properties are in contrast with the thematic role of object. Furthermore, we show how this hypothesis is supported by the observation that the two strategies are mutually exclusive in Romance languages.