Specificity Effects and Object Movement In Turkish and Uyghur

Abstract

This paper examines a typologically novel differential object marking pattern in Uyghur where marked objects loose their obligatory specific interpretation under fronting to sentence initial position. This pattern contrasts with the more typical differential object marking pattern found in, for example, Turkish where marked objects always have a specific interpretation regardless of surface position. The Uyghur data, I argue, suggest that specific interpretation of object DPs does not always correlate with structural height relative to the VP (Diesing 1992). Instead, I propose a new model where a specific interpretation of an object is forced if it passed through a particular position in the structure.