Interaction of the differential object marker pam with other prominence hierarchies in syntax in German Sign Language (DGS)

There has been growing debate about the special status of object marking in sign languages. In this article, we contribute evidence for the existence of a differential object marker in DGS (German Sign Language). Based on data from the Public DGS Corpus, we investigate the behavior of this sign, glossed as pam , in different morphosyntactic environments to understand its interaction with different morphosyntactic phenomena involved in marking argument structure. We focus on constituent order, verb modification, and argument realization as phenomena sensitive to relations of prominence among arguments. Although the accumulation of different markers of prominence, e.g., argument marking with pam and through verb modification, may occur, we argue that pam occurs primarily when other markers of object prominence – in particular, changes in constituent order and verb modification – do not occur, and see the main motivation for the use of pam in the prominence-lending semantic properties in the nominal and verbal domains. In addition, based on our analyses, we argue against the existence of two related pam signs, with distinct agreement marking and differential object-marking function. We also argue against an analysis of pam as a preposition-like element. Instead, we propose an analysis of pam in terms of differential argument indexing, sensitive to semantic and pragmatic features of both subject and object arguments.