Balkan Romance and Southern Italo-Romance: Differential Object Marking and Its Variation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Very very nice paper on DOM in the dialect of Ragusa and in (Daco-)Romanian from a comparative-typological perspective, (Western) Romance and Balkan! The author is obviously a specialist in DOM, this can easily be seen from the accuracy and the details of the descriptions s.he offers from a crosslinguist perspective. I really much appreciated the comparative data illustrating DOM in Ragusa and in Romanian. I fully agree with the points of similarity and divergence s.he presents both on the empirical and at the theoretical level (sensitivity to humanness/animacy, occurrence of clitic doubling and the distinction between CD - CLLD - resumptive clitics, occurence of the DOM marker in dislocations, lack of correlation between DOM and topicality, different internal structures of the marked DP). Bringing the Ragusa DOM with its various specificities in the more general picture of DOM provide us a good opportunity to better understand this complex and intriguing phenomenon. I much appreciated the Balkan data which show a different mechanism for DOM (i.e. clitic doubling). This is particulary relevant for Romanian DOM (which presents a mixed typology, Romance and Balkan), but it seems that it applies to a lesser extent to Ragusa DOM. Or, in its actual form, the paper is very much centered on CD and on its various analyses in the Balkan languages and dialects. This part is in my opinion too dense and a bit orthogonal for what we need to understand from the comparison between DOM in Ragusa and Romanian. Actually, I had the impression to have read two articles, the one finishing at page 30, on DOM in Balkan varieties (and Romanian), and the one starting at page 31, on DOM in Ragusa and Romanian. I am fully aware about the importance and the necessity to describe the DOM factors and strategies in Balkan, since Romanian is concerned with some of these mechanisms. However, I consider that this part of the manuscript is too heavy for the overall economy of the paper. There are a plethora of references and analyses of very interested and specific data that I guess the author could better synthetise by keeping the main and the most relevant ones. The comparison between Romanian and Ragusa dialect - which seems to me to be in the heart oh this research - is likely to become clearer this way.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you very much for your detailed comments. We are very grateful for your feedback, which we have incorporated into the revised version of the paper. We attach here our replies. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper presents a comparative overview of DOM in a number of languages that have been claimed to exhibit common characteristics. While the paper does an excellent job in discussing the extant literature and in presenting relevant data and generalizations known in the literature, the paper fails to a) provide any new data or generalizations, b) any new theoretical claims that could be considered progress in the field and c) in providing any useful insight based on the comparison of the languages except the "well-known observation that differentially marking is a phenomenon prone to non-trivial variation at the microparameter level".

This is simply too little to deserve publication. I have no recommendation on how to improve the paper because I simply fail to see the general goal of the paper and how it would represent progress even if it substantiated the best version of itself. What I could imagine, instead, given that the authors apparently invested quite a significant amount of work into this, would be to turn the paper into a review article and try to publish it as such. Take out the non-substantiated rhetorical overlay about the scientific contribution regarding the Balkan Sprachbund and instead just try to objectively report on the literature on these languages and thus be useful for new researchers who are trying to get into this topic. With this in mind, however, the paper would still need to be significantly improved in terms of academic quality: the paper jumps in an unclear way between blindly following (with no argumentation or data) theoretical claims from the literature and extensively showing with many data points other claims from the literature. One cannot see why so much effort is invested in certain cases but not in others. Also some of the newer literature is not really sufficiently discussed, such as the analysis of Hill and Mardale in their new book on Romanian, which is also relevant for the other languages discussed, and many other recent papers. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The English is fine, albeit editing would be necessary, but the typesetting is problematic as the tree edges are technically invisible, so I needed quite a bit of imagination to apprehend the trees. Also the semantics provided for incorporation is highly dubious, probably due to typos/typesetting.

Author Response

Dear reviwer,

Thank you very much for your detailed comments. We are very grateful for your feedback, which we have incorporated into the revised version of the paper. We attach here our replies. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper is interesting, but it needs further elaboration. First of all, it is not clear why a comparison with all the Balkan languages is needed. I think that section 2 is too long and not useful, it should be compressed in table or in one page. Secondly, several relevant references for Romanian are missing (see comments). Thirdly, some examples are not grammatical. It is not mentioned whether the grammaticality judgements come from the author(s) of from a questionnaire.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you very much for your detailed comments. We are very grateful for your feedback, which we have incorporated into the revised version of the paper. We attach here our replies. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is the second round of revisions and I think the authors took into account my initial observations to the previous version. The paper in clearly improved. Clarifications to my questions have been made.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper is much clearer than its previous version and the relevant references are now quoted. The author/authors seem(s) to have incorporated the majority of observations.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments.