Object Marking in Western Eurasia: The Circum-Baltic Area Dissolves into the Broader Areal Background

Abstract

This paper investigates object marking strategies in Circum-Baltic languages and beyond, using a sample of 103 predicates from 30 Western Eurasian languages from the BivalTyp database. The study aims to identify areal clusters in object marking and evaluate the relevance of the Circum-Baltic linguistic area in this context. It finds that while most Circum-Baltic languages dissolve into larger, genealogy-driven clusters, areal signals are present, particularly with Lithuanian merging with Slavic languages due to genitive-taking predicates. German deviates from the larger Germanic cluster, merging with Latvian and Hungarian without a specific marking strategy driving this alignment. The results suggest that the concept of a linguistic area is less effective for describing object marking relationships around the Baltic Sea, in contrast to the Balkan linguistic area, where cross-linguistic clusters of object marking strategies do align with the linguistic area. Additionally, the paper discusses large-scale trends, such as comitativity prominence and the comparison of observed object marking strategy distributions with the predicted Zipf distribution.