Abstract
Spanish marks animate and specific direct objects overtly with the preposition a, an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM). However, in some varieties of Spanish, DOM is advancing to inanimate objects. Language change starts at the individual level, but how does it start? What manifestation of linguistic knowledge does it affect? This study traced this innovative use of DOM in oral production, grammaticality judgments and on-line comprehension (reading task with eye-tracking) in the Spanish of Mexico. Thirty-four native speakers (ages 18–22) from the southeast of Mexico participated in the study. Results showed that the incidence of the innovative use of DOM with inanimate objects varied by task: DOM innovations were detected in on-line processing more than in grammaticality judgments and oral production. Our results support the hypothesis that language variation and change may start with on-line comprehension.
Highlights
One of the central goals of linguistic theory is to understand the abstract linguistic knowledge of native speakers (Chomsky 1965)
Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a phenomenon found in a large number of languages (Bossong 1991; Sinnemäki 2014) in which the case marking of the object noun phrase (NP) is determined by certain semantic factors
Previous research has suggested that speakers of Mexican Spanish extend DOM to inanimate objects (Von Heusinger and Kaiser 2005; Tippets 2010)
Summary
One of the central goals of linguistic theory is to understand the abstract linguistic knowledge of native speakers (Chomsky 1965). Silva-Corvalán (1994) investigated language variation and change in the Spanish of Los Angeles using a sociolinguistic interview and other oral elicitation measures that involved sentence completion and translation to elicit different verb tenses. Since so little is known about the way in which language variation is cognitively represented at the individual level, in this study, we use psycholinguistic methodologies to investigate how Differential Object Marking (DOM) might be spreading to inanimate objects in Mexican Spanish. Our results will show that native speakers of Mexican Spanish exhibit the innovative uses of DOM with animate objects in on-line sentence comprehension but not yet in oral production, suggesting that language change may manifest first in comprehension, and in production or other linguistic behavior (Czypionka and Kupisch 2019; Lundquist et al 2016).
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