Direccionales con 'con' y Marcado Diferencial de Objeto

Abstract

An understudied property of Spanish grammar is the possibility of obtaining a directional reading with a PP introduced by con ‘with’, as in Ven con papá ‘Come to daddy’. This work explores this construction taking into account both the properties of the verb and the prepositional phrase, identifying as one of the restrictions that the preposition must in such cases introduce an animate noun; this relates such cases to standard Differential Object Marking (DOM). The proposal, which closely follows the analyses of DOM based on animacy, is that con is able to grammaticalise the [person] property of an animate noun.