The Four Ways of Indicating the Direct Object in Syriac and Their Use in Relation to Animacy/Definiteness

Abstract

The Syriac language has several ways of indicating the direct object – by the preposition l-, by an agreement marker on the main verb, or by both. Also, there may be no marker at all. Such a phenomenon is called “Differential Object Marking (DOM)” and can be observed in many languages in the world. In this paper I examine which of the object’s semantic properties control the presence or absence of the object markers. For this study I used the “Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua” as my data source. I noted all the direct objects in that work and analyzed their semantic properties. I took into consideration not only definiteness, which has been suggested in previous studies, but also animacy, which is related to this kind of phenomena in many languages. Through this study, I found that the object markers are used more in cases where the object is in higher position, not only in the definiteness hierarchy (Proper Noun > Definite NP > Indefinite Specific NP > Non-specific NP) but also in the animacy hierarchy (Human > Non-Human Animate > Inanimate). In other words, animacy too is relevant to DOM in Syriac. But at the same time, I noted that the definiteness and animacy of the object noun alone are not enough to explain the conditions under which object markers are used. Thus, we can say that in addition to expanding data, we need to examine other nominal properties, verbal features, and characteristics of sentences in order to determine whether they are relevant or not.