Differntial Object Marking in Persian: A Typological Review of the Object Marker

The linguistic phenomenon of differential object marking (DOM) has long been recognized as a basis for typological categorization of world languages in terms of how the direct object is case-marked. Yet, DOM in Farsi constitutes a source of contention among linguists. Some of them maintain that DOM actually exists in Farsi where they assert some types of the direct object are case-marked with “rā,” but, on the contrary, others give counterexamples for each instance to prove that is not the case. That is why some Iranian linguists have entirely abandoned the idea of DOM in Farsi and assigned “rā” a new functional role other than an object case-marker. By elucidating the theoretical bases of DOM in general, the present analytical review aims to apply a new approach to how “rā” is used in Farsi sentences with transitive verbs. The approach not only proposes explanations for the aforesaid counterexamples, but also attempts to restore “rā” to its grammatical role as a case-marker by introducing a new viewpoint on DOM in Farsi.Thus, by establishing a grammatical role to “rā” as a marker of some kinds of direct objects, the present paper has attempted to redefine DOM in Persian. It is hoped that future corpus-based studies about the relative frequencies of “rā” occurrences in Persian sentences will lend evidential support to this theoretical approach.