THE ROLE OF SEMANTIC TYPE IN DIFFERENTIAL OBJECT MARKING Tonia Bleam University of Maryland Abstract Spanish, like many other languages (e.g. Hindi), exhibits differential object marking (DOM). It is well-known that DOM seems to be sensitive to the animacy and/or specificity of the direct object (Bossong 1985, Aissen 2003). It is argued here that the Spanish prepositional accusative, or a-marking, is a realization of the features [+accusative] and [+animate] within a nominal projection containing a determiner (D). Nominal projections lacking D are property-denoting and are not a-marked. I show that there is a direct map between the presence or absence of a-marking and the semantic type of the (animate) direct object nominal. 1. Introduction 1 Many languages have been shown to exhibit what Bossong has labeled differential object marking (DOM; Bossong 1985, Aissen 2003). In these languages, DOM seems to play a role in marking animacy or specificity or some combination of these. For example, see Enç (1991) for Turkish, Farkas (1978) for Romanian, Mahajan (1990) for Hindi, and Lidz (1999, to appear) for Kannada, among others. Although DOM makes reference to the same kinds of features across languages, it is uncommon to find two languages that make exactly the same divisions. The goal of this paper is to provide an account of DOM in a single language, Spanish, with the idea that in-depth analysis of individual cases will help shed light on the cross-linguistic question. In Spanish, the ‘personal’ or prepositional a (illustrated in (1)) is often described as marking direct objects if they are both animate and ‘specific’ (see Jaeggli 1982, Masullo 1992, inter alia). (1) Mari vió a la mujer. Mari saw A the woman ‘Mari saw the woman.’ However, the sense in which specificity plays a role in a-marking has not been clearly formalized before now. 2 In this paper I show that there is a direct mapping between the presence or absence of a-marking (where it is an option)