Differential object marking (DOM) is a common crosslinguistic phenomenon whereby overt case marking on objects surfaces only on a subset of objects, namely, those high in definiteness, specificity, and/ or animacy (e.g., Comrie 1979, Croft 1988, Bossong 1991, Enç 1991, Aissen 2003, de Swart 2007). In Spanish, for example, simplifying somewhat, overt case marking of objects (boldfaced throughout the squib) is required when the object is specific and animate and banned when the object is nonspecific or inanimate.
In this squib, we set out to (a) introduce new findings revealing that many DOM languages allow asymmetric marking in coordinations when conjuncts are mismatched in terms of animacy/definiteness, and (b) show that these findings are extremely problematic for many popular (broadly) Minimalist accounts of DOM, namely, those that derive DOM via movement (e.g., de Hoop 1996, Torrego 1998, Woolford 1999, Bhatt 2007...