In a broad sense, a language may be said to have Differential Subject Marking (DSM) if some subjects have a different Case, agree differently, or occur in a different position than others. In a narrower sense, such differences are thought of as DSM effects only if they depend on the features of the subject in some way, and in the narrowest sense, DSM effects refer to situations in which only subjects with features toward the lower end of the Person/Animacy Hierarchy (third person, inanimate) are morphologically marked. In this last sense, DSM effects conform to the model in Silverstein (1976) where DSM effects are taken to be the mirror image of DOM (Differential Object Marking) effects where morphological marking of objects is associated with features at the higher end of the Person/Animacy Hierarchy.
This paper will focus on DSM effects involving Case. The primary question to be addressed is this: Is there a special type of grammatical rule or principle whose exclusive role is to produce DSM (and DOM) effects, or do DSM effects follow from independently motivated principles of Case Theory? The position to be argued for here is that the DSM effects involving Case have diverse causes; what they have in common is only a descriptive unity, in that they all involve alternations in the Case of subjects. To the extent that can be determined at this point, it appears that DSM effects involving Case follow from independently motivated principles of grammar, and that there is no special type of grammatical rules or principle devoted exclusively to producing DSM effects. Nevertheless, there are still some kinds of DSM effects that we cannot yet account for with existing principles of Case Theory.
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Woolford, E. (2009). Differential Subject Marking at Argument Structure, Syntax, and PF. In: de Hoop, H., de Swart, P. (eds) Differential Subject Marking. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 72. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6497-5_2
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