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In its most narrow sense, differential object marking (henceforth DOM) refers to a state of affairs in which a proper subset of direct objects of a given language receives overt marking by a morpheme A, while the complementary proper subset of direct objects either does not receive any such marking at all or receives overt marking by another morpheme B. DOM is triggered by (usually a complex interplay of) object-related features, such as animacy, referentiality, and topicality, as well as by additional verbal and configurational ones, such as telicity and secondary predication, among others. Further features determining the extension of DOM are transitivity, affectedness, and individuation. Documented in many language families, DOM is also firmly anchored in Romance. Its prenominal nature shows that it is yet another instantiation of the typological change from primarily right-headed Classical Latin to primarily left-headed Romance. Romance varieties differ as to the degree of grammaticalization of DOM. Among the “big five” national languages, only Spanish and Romanian display a well-developed DOM-system (realized by a and pe, respectively). Yet, a pan-Romance look reveals that DOM is also well attested in Asturian, many Italo-Romance dialects (e.g., Corsican, Engadinese Romansh, Sardinian, Sicilian, Southern Italian), and even some Gallo-Romance varieties (e.g., Gascon and Languedocian). These latter partly use DOM-morphemes (henceforth DOM-m; within glosses, DOM reads “direct object marker”) different from a and pe and, in addition, in part display a complementary distribution of DOM and definite articles. Generally speaking, Romance DOM is on the rise, in the sense that it arose with dislocated, topicalized strong personal pronouns in Late Latin and has since been diachronically expanding along typologically well-established pathways. Such processes continue to be visible in a number of contemporary Romance varieties, among which are Argentinian Spanish and some non-prescriptive registers of Galician and Catalan. The potential sensitivity of DOM to language contact is also evinced by some Italian and French regiolects in contact with varieties making wider use of DOM. At the same time, DOM-grammaticalization may be reversible: Cuban and Dominican Spanish, for instance, have been reported to display receding DOM; the same is true of Spanish in a number of language contact and heritage speaker settings and of post-18th-century Portuguese. Even Standard Italian, Northern Italian dialects, Standard French, and Francoprovençal—often argued not to possess DOM at all—do marginally allow for it with dislocated strong first- and second-person personal pronouns.

The distinction between manner and result verbs arises from the event structure approach to verb meaning. In this approach verb meaning consists of two parts, a structural component that includes a small number of primitive predicates indicating event types, and a root component that describes idiosyncratic actions and states. Manner verbs describe actions but not the end results; they have a simple event structure. By contrast, result verbs describe the end results but not the way actions are carried out; they have a complex event structure. The distinction plays an important role in argument realization and constraints on possible verb meanings. It is also related to an issue that has been controversial in the study of Chinese verbs—whether there are simple accomplishments in Chinese. On the basis of Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s diagnostics for manner and result verbs in English, five tests are suggested for Mandarin Chinese (henceforth Chinese) verbs. Two tests concern result: (a) result cannot be denied; (b) in forming resultative verb compounds the second verb and the object are restricted. Three tests identify manner verbs: (a) subject cannot be nonhuman, (b) action cannot be denied, (c) action has duration. Relying on the five tests, dynamic simple verbs in Chinese are classified into three groups—manner, result, and manner + result. Result verbs include verbs of damage, for example, duan ‘cut off’ and hui ‘destroy’; manner verbs include the verb of killing sha ‘kill’, de-adjectival degree achievement verbs, for example, re ‘heat up’, verbs of cooking, for example, kao ‘bake’; and one verb is found to lexicalize both manner and result—mie ‘put out, extinguish’. The verb of killing sha ‘kill, do killing’ is examined in detail, as its status has remained unresolved in the literature. It is found that sha entails change but not culminating change; morphosyntactically it patterns like manner verbs, hence its manner status. In terms of the affectedness hierarchy, the cutoff between result and manner is between verbs of quantized change and non-quantized change. The grammatical relevance of the verb classification can be seen in argument realization. Manner verbs takes more than one type of object, whereas result verbs only take one type of object, where the patient undergoes scalar change. In argument alternation, result verbs, but not manner or manner + result verbs, participate in causative alternation, and only manner verbs allow object alternations. This data suggests that Chinese does have simple accomplishments.

Words are sensitive to syntactic context. Argument realization is the study of the relation between argument-taking words, the syntactic contexts they appear in and the interpretive properties that constrain the relation between them.