Affectedness and Differential Object Marking in Spanish

Abstract

In this study we investigate the impact of affectedness on the diachronic development of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish. DOM in Spanish synchronically depends on (i) the referential features of the direct object, such as animacy and referentiality, and (ii) the semantics of the verb. Several studies have also shown that the diachronic development of DOM proceeds along the Animacy Scale and the Referentiality Scale, and some recent corpus studies have indicated an influence of the verb’s semantics on this diachronic process. This study presents new findings from a detailed analysis of extensive corpus research on the distribution of DOM with respect to affectedness, understood as “the persistent change of an event participant”. We use Tsunoda’s Affectedness Scale to order the verb classes under investigation. Our findings provide evidence that this scale can be partly correlated with the diachronic spread of DOM in Spanish which would tend to confirm the influence of verbal semantics on DOM in Spanish.