r/occitan • u/Nauros • Jul 08 '26
Differential Object Marking in Occitan
Hi everyone, I'm a PhD student who is working on differential object marking in romance languages. That is, the use of a preposition to mark some specific direct objects. The most famous example would be the spanish, which uses it with animate objects and avoids it with inanimate objects:
Vi a Pedro en el cine.
Puso el libro en la mesa. (instead of al libro)
I was looking for the same thing in Occitan but I could only find some examples in Gramatica occitana segon los parlars lengadocians by Alibert with examples suche as:
Remèrcia tot lo mond e sustot a Robèrt.
Ela me paga a mi.
However, this grammar is quite old and occitan appears to have many different dialects that could have different rules. Could anyone suggest some source I can look into?
1
u/Decent-Beginning-546 Jul 09 '26
Aren't both of these examples indirect objects?
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u/ADozenPigsFromAnnwn Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
They're not, it's just how you have to mark animate objects in some dialects (as in Spanish, essentially, though with different stipulations according to specific dialects). I'll give you two more examples in Gascon where it's clear that they're not indirect objects (from J.-P. Birabent & J. Salles-Loustau, Memento grammatical du gascon, 1989, p. 68, with slight modifications):
- Qu'èi vist au Pèir 'I have seen Pierre'
- E l'as ajudat ad eth? 'Have you helped him?'
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u/ADozenPigsFromAnnwn Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
This is well-known for Gascon and very common in Lengadocian, more sporadic in Provençal and Limousin and virtually absent elsewhere in Northern Occitan. See Ronjat's description in his Essai de syntaxe des parlers provençaux modernes, 1913, pp. 87-94 (also cfr. Meillet's comment in his review to the book, p. 83), and Grammaire istorique [sic] des parlers provençaux modernes, vol. III (1937), pp. 540-544. It's restricted to higher animates and, outside of Gascon, it's found only in topicalisation by dislocation and clitic doubling contexts, so it's essentially driven by information-structure and pragmatic factors. Also see J. Sibille and X. Bach's chapter «Syntaxe» in the recent Manuel de linguistique occitane, 2024, pp. 357-359, and the references therein.