Differential object marking in early Italo-Romance and old Sardinian

This paper explores the differential marking of objects (DOM) in two southern early Italo- Romance vernaculars, namely old Sicilian and old Neapolitan, and in old Sardinian texts from two different areas, Logudoro and Arborea. We investigate the constraints on the marking of objects, whether semantic, encoding the Individuation Hierarchy, syntactic, determined by verbal valency and/or the position of the O argument in relation to the verb, or pragmatic, resulting from the topicality of the object. We show that, unlike in old Neapolitan and old Sicilian, in old Sardinian Topicality and the Person Hierarchy do not appear to play a role in the occurrence of the object marker a(d).