Word Order Variation as Differential Object Marking: Evidence from Wenzhounese

Abstract The canonical word order in Wenzhounese (a southern Wu dialect) is SVO, but there are cases where the object must be preposed. In this paper, I provide a detailed description of obligatory SOV in Wenzhounese, showing that word order variation results from the interaction of grammatical factors such as aspect, specificity and topicality. By comparing Wenzhounese with other Wu dialects and genetically unrelated languages, I demonstrate that word order variation in Wu dialects is an example of differential object marking (DOM). This finding enables us to study DOM in a broader typological context: some languages mark certain object NPs morphologically (via asymmetric case marking), while others do so configurationally (via word order change), but the factors that govern the marking are comparable. This suggests that there are universal principles underlying DOM, which allow us to analyse these typologically distinct languages in a similar fashion.