ИСТИНА

In Tatar, as in other Turkic languages such as Turkish and Sakha, objects may be either overtly case marked (Accusative) or unmarked; cf. (1). Several different accounts have been proposed in the literature explaining this alternation either in terms of the semantics of the object (e.g. specificity, cf. Enç 1991) or in terms of its position in the clause (cf. Baker & Vinokurova 2010). In this paper, we propose an alternative analysis in terms of the amount of functional architecture in the object. Specifically, we argue that DP objects receive structural (accusative) Case, while Small Nominals (SNs; i.e. NPs or NumPs; cf. Pereltsvaig 2006) remain Caseless. Moreover, we argue that neither the semantic approach, nor the positional analysis can account for the full range of data about DOM in Tatar (which comes from our fieldwork on a particular subdialect of Tatar).