Differential Object Marking and Nominal Licensing

Abstract

This paper presents a novel account of Differential Object Marking as an instance of case assigned by a post-syntactic Agree-Case operation that transduces agreement relations established in the syntax by marking the goal rather than the probe. In this sense, it is a modern interpretation of Nichols' (1986) Head-Marking and Dependent Marking dichotomy. Analyzing the intricate details of Differential Object Markin in Kashmiri, I show that not all but some nominals need licensing under well defined syntactic configurations. Expanding on Kalin's (2018) observation that Person Case Constraint (PCC) and Differential Object Marking occur in similar configurations, I argue that PCC is observed in languages that do not have an Agree-Case mechanism.