The project investigates the conditions of the referential context for Differentiated Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish, Romanian, Turkish and Mongolian. DOM denotes the phenomenon of certain languages to morpho-syntactically (case-) mark the direct object if it is highly `individuated', i.e. high on the scales for animacy, definiteness and topicality. We will develop a semantic model that accounts for the interaction of these three quite different categories and unify them in the new concept of referential context, which determines the specification process of underspecified lexical forms.
A detailed description of the project can be found here.