Differential Object Marking In Spanish Research Articles

Differential Object Marking in Spanish: the effect of affectedness

L’afectació és una propietat clau dels arguments pacients que ha demostrat ser un factor important per a la selecció argumental i el marcatge de cas. A més, també és rellevant per al marcatge diferencial d’objecte (MDO). Tanmateix, hi ha molt pocs estudis que investiguin la influència real de l’afectació en el MDO en espanyol. A més, aquests estudis anteriors es basen en anàlisis de corpus centrades en la diacronia del MDO. Aquest article assumeix la noció d’afectació desenvolupada en el marc de la dinàmica de forces, segons la qual un argument afectat es defineix com el receptor de la força especificada pel contingut verbal. Seguint aquesta definició, presentem una investigació empírica basada en dades experimentals d’un qüestionari d’elecció forçada fet a 326 parlants d’espanyol europeu. L’estudi mostra que l’afectació té una influència significativa en l’acceptabilitat del MDO. A més, una inspecció detinguda de les dades experimentals revela l’observació que el MDO no només es veu potenciat per l’afectació de l’objecte directe, sinó també per l’agentivitat d’aquest.

Productive Vocabulary Knowledge Predicts Acquisition of Spanish DOM in Brazilian Portuguese-Speaking Learners

Differential object marking (DOM) in Spanish refers to the overt morphological marking of certain direct objects. Specifically, this a-marking of direct objects is driven by animacy and usually precedes human objects. Other features such as specificity and definiteness matter to a lesser extent. This direct object a-marking has also been attested in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), but with more restrictions than in Spanish. Thus, BP is typically not considered a DOM language. This article discusses the acquisition of DOM in second language (L2) Spanish among BP speakers. Seventy-four adult Brazilians with various levels of L2 proficiency completed three experimental tasks: elicited production, acceptability, and productive vocabulary knowledge, which measures productive lexical knowledge and was designed specifically to assess this language pair. We analyzed our data to uncover the knowledge that BP-speaking L2 learners of Spanish possess of DOM and to determine whether their knowledge of DOM can be predicted by their L2 productive vocabulary knowledge. Results indicate that the learners acquire the animacy-driven nature of Spanish DOM, both in their productive and receptive grammatical knowledge, as their productive vocabulary knowledge increases. The L2 learners present different acquisitional outcomes yet those with deeper productive vocabulary knowledge show a stronger animacy-driven distribution of DOM in Spanish.

Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence on DOM in Romanian-Spanish bilinguals

Aims and objectives: This study aims to explore the acquisition of differential object marking (DOM) of Spanish and Romanian in balanced Romanian-speaking L2 speakers of Spanish. The study is motivated by the paucity of studies analyzing bidirectional cross-linguistic influence (BCLI) in DOM. Methodology: Romanian-Spanish bilinguals completed a background language questionnaire, a productive vocabulary test, an elicited production task, and an acceptability judgment task in Romanian and Spanish. Two groups of Spanish and Romanian monolinguals completed the same tasks in their languages for comparison purposes. Findings: The bilinguals show signs of BCLI at their DOM in Spanish and Romanian. They may also be at an incipient stage of L1 attrition. Originality: This is the first study that examines BCLI at DOM and the acquisition of DOM in Spanish by speakers of Romanian in a naturalistic setting. Significance: This project highlights the importance of examining both the L1 and the L2 when examining cross-linguistic influence. Limitations: This study cannot examine proficiency effects or acquisition stages because all the participants are highly proficient in Spanish.

On the Nonexistence of Asymmetric DOM in Spanish

Kalin and Weisser (2019) observe that Spanish, among other differential-object-marking (DOM) languages, allows for what they call asymmetric DOM in coordination, that is, a DP coordinate structure in which an unmarked DP and a marked DP are conjoined. Given that coordinate structures are islands, asymmetric DOM challenges movement analyses for DOM. Yet we show that alleged cases of asymmetric DOM in Spanish do not involve DP-coordination; rather, they involve coordination of a larger structure plus TP-ellipsis. Evidence involves binding, extraction, fragment answers, and association with focus. We conclude that asymmetric DOM does not exist in Spanish, a fact consonant with movement analyses.

A Study of DOM in Asturian (‘Dialectu Vaqueiru’)

The present paper explores Differential Object Marking in a variety of Asturian (Western Iberian Romance) spoken in western Asturias (northwestern Spain). This ancestral form of speech stands out from Central Asturian and especially from Standard Spanish. For a number of reasons, ranging from profound changes in pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and information structure to slight but very relevant effects on syntax. The main goal of this study is to examine the special marking of direct objects in order to find out what triggers the distribution of Differential Object Marking in this variety. To this aim, this paper will examine, from a variationist perspective, the influence of a number of semantic and discourse-pragmatic parameters on the marking of direct objects in this Western Asturian language as well as in Standard Spanish 1 and Central Asturian (which is generally considered the normative variety of Asturian). The results obtained from this comparison will allow us to outline the differences between these three varieties in terms of object marking, shedding more light on the origin and function of Differential Object Marking in Spanish.

The acquisition of differential object marking in Spanish by Romanian speakers

Abstract The obligatory use of the preposition ‘a’ with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish (Juan conoce a María “Juan knows Maria”) is a well-known instance of Differential Object Marking (dom). This study investigates the acquisition of dom by native speakers of Romanian learning Spanish. Spanish and Romanian have dom lexicalized in the prepositions ‘a’ (Spanish) and in ‘pe’ (Romanian). In the two languages dom is regulated by animacy and specificity. Thirty-two native speakers of Spanish and 36 Romanian-speaking learners of Spanish with advanced proficiency completed a written production, a written comprehension, and an acceptability judgment task. The results show that, in general, and unlike what has been found for English-speaking learners of Spanish, advanced Romanian learners of Spanish are successful at acquiring the feature specification and distribution of dom in Spanish. The findings are discussed with respect to the nature of ultimate attainment as a function of language transfer.

Structure complexity effects in child heritage Spanish: The case of the Spanish personala

Aims and objectives:This study examines the acquisition of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in heritage Spanish children born in the USA and the potential role of structure complexity and chronological age.Design:Bilingual children were compared with monolingual children matched by age and long-term immigrants (children’s parents) via an Elicited Production task. We elicited the distribution of personal a in simple and Clitic Left Dislocated (CLLD) structures.Data and analysis:Results were entered into repeated analyses of variance measure with type of structure and group as dependent variables and chronological age as a covariate.Conclusions:Results show decreased production of personal a among the bilingual children, especially in CLLD contexts. We also found strong correlations between target use and type of structure, but no correlations with developmental age among the bilingual children. Parents and monolingual children behaved at ceiling with matrix questions but showed variable behavior with CLLD structures. We argue for incomplete specification of the animacy and specificity features constraining DOM and structure complexity effects affecting child bilingual grammars.Originality:This study highlights that heritage speakers do not necessarily become less native-like with age and increased exposure to English. The comparison of the bilingual children to both monolingual children and their parents was essential to mitigate the effects of dialect and cognitive development.Implications:Given that age was not the determining factor in bilingual children’s production of DOM in Spanish, it would seem that exposure to and use of the heritage language play a larger role. Additionally, for theories of language acquisition, these findings suggest that an early age of onset of acquisition is not a sufficient condition for native-like attainment, especially when input is lacking.

Integrating Linguistic Theory and Experimentation in L2 Acquisition: Learning of Spanish Differential Object Marking by Portuguese and English speakers

Abstract This paper focuses on consequences for linguistic theory of a set of experiments on the L2 acquisition of Spanish Differential Object Marking (DOM), with three experimental groups: a native control group, a group of L2 learners whose L1 is English, and a group of L2 learners whose L1 is Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The results of the experiments shed light on two questions of theoretical import: (a) how best to characterize the syntax of Spanish DOM, and (b) whether BP should be classified as a DOM language. We argue that our results support López’s (2012, Indefinite objects: Scrambling, choice functions, and differential marking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) syntactic theory account of DOM over that of Torrego (1998, The dependencies of objects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), in particular due to the more fine-grained distinctions between non-specific objects made by López (2012) compared to Torrego (1998). We also argue that although BP is a DOM language (as suggested by Schwenter 2014, Two kinds of differential object marking in Portuguese and Spanish. In Patricia Amaral & Ana Maria Carvalho (eds.), Portuguese-Spanish interfaces: Diachrony, synchrony, and contact, 237–260. Amsterdam: John Benjamins), our BP subjects do not show a clear acquisitional advantage over English speakers with regard to Spanish DOM, due to independent reasons that include the morphological realization of DOM in Spanish.

Differential object marking in Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian as heritage languages

Erosion of differential object marking (DOM)—the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects—has been observed in Spanish heritage speakers who are second-generation immigrants in the United States (Montrul 2004, Montrul & Bowles 2009). We investigated whether DOM is similarly vulnerable in heritage speakers of Hindi and Romanian, two other languages that also exhibit DOM, as well as in first-generation immigrants, adults who are presumably the main source of input to heritage speakers. We report the results of three experimental studies testing acceptability of DOM through a bimodal judgment task in first- and second-generation Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian speakers in the US and native speakers in Mexico, India, and Romania matched for age and socioeconomic status. Our results show structural changes with DOM in all of the heritage speaker groups to different degrees. Acceptance of nontarget DOM omission was more extensive in Spanish than in Hindi and Romanian. First-generation Hindi and Romanian immigrants did not differ in their grammatical proficiency and acceptance of DOM omission from the Hindi and Romanian speakers tested in India and in Romania. However, the first-generation Mexican immigrants displayed similar performance to the Spanish heritage speakers, suggesting that Spanish DOM is prone to L1 attrition in the first generation as well. We discuss linguistic and experiential factors relevant to the three languages and the three immigrant communities to explain these findings.

Differential Object Marking in Spanish: state of the art

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 18.1pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-left: 1.0cm; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">This state of the art tries to cover as much as possible about the properties, conditions and analyses of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish. Starting with some considerations about the boundaries of the phenomenon, it considers its morphological, semantic and syntactic properties –with respect both to the internal properties of the direct object and to the wider context in which it appears–. It also reviews the other morphosyntactic phenomena that have been claimed to correlate with DOM, and finally goes through a number of analysis in different theoretical traditions to highlight the points of agreement and debate in the current literature.</span></p>

Spanish Differential Object Marking: An Empirical Study of Implicit and Explicit Instruction

Abstract This article examines the impact of instruction on L2 learners’ ability to recognize and produce differential object marking in Spanish as measured by three written tasks: a grammatical preference task, a cued sentence production task, and a discourse-length narrative task. These assessment measures are hypothesized to tap both implicit and explicit knowledge based on criteria proposed by Ellis (2005) and Ellis, Loewen, Elder, Erlam, Philp & Reinders (2009). English-speaking learners (n = 123) were randomly assigned to one of three instructional treatments: input flood, enhanced input flood, and explicit grammar. The results indicate a significant advantage for the explicit grammar group on the preference task and the cued sentence production task. The remaining two groups showed modest improvement after the treatment, but with no significant differences between them. These results confirm the advantage of explicit instruction vis-à-vis more implicit treatments, although this advantage seems to be limited to controlled assessment measures.

Affectedness and Differential Object Marking in Spanish

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.

Verbal semantics and the diachronic development of DOM in Spanish

The use of the marker a with a direct object in Spanish is an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM), which is cross linguistically a well-documented phenomenon. In Spanish, there are two main dimensions that determine a-marking of direct objects: (i) the semantic and (discourse) pragmatic properties of the direct object, such as animacy, definiteness, specificity and topicality; and (ii) the lexical semantics of the verb, such as aktionsart properties and selectional restrictions with respect to the position of the direct object. Diachronically, a-marking spreads along the Referentiality Hierarchy from personal pronouns and proper names to definite and finally indefinite noun phrases, a process that has been well examined. In this study, I focus on the influence of the lexical semantics of verb classes on this process. I present original findings from two corpus searches from the 12th to the 20th century. The data show that the diachronic evolution of a-marking crucially depends on the verb semantics of the governing predicate, and that the change proceeds according to the Constant Rate Hypothesis of Kroch. These findings suggest that a-marking in Spanish, and DOM in general, can only be described in a multi-dimensional space consisting of the semantic properties of the direct object and the lexical semantics of the verb.

The acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Spanish

In this paper, I show that a constraint-based approach to DOM, such as the OT system proposed by Aissen (2003), leads to the conclusion that the child will entertain a number of grammars different from the target grammar, before acquiring the final ranking of constraints, even under the learnability assumptions of the OT framework (such as those made by Tesar and Smolensky (1998, 2000). The data examined here, from Spanish-speaking children in the CHILDES database, clearly shows that children master Spanish DOM with a performance virtually errorless. This raises doubts regarding the capacity of the OT framework to explain a key aspect of human language, namely, the process of acquisition.

Specificity and Differential Object Marking in Spanish

L’ús de la preposició a amb objectes directes en espanyol constitueix un cas ben conegut del fenomen més general del Marcatge Diferencial d’Objecte (MDO). A les gramàtiques de l’espanyol la inserció de a normalment es presenta com un fet que depèn de dos factors: l’animacitat i la referencialitat / especificitat. La correlació entre el marcador d’objecte i l’especificitat no és sistemàtica, fonamentalment perquè l’animacitat (i no pas l’especificitat) és l’inductor dominant del MDO en espanyol; però també hi ha una sèrie de fets que indiquen que la presència de a tendeix a associar-se amb lectures específiques. Per tal de donar compte d’aquests fets sense postular cap tret [+específic] al significat lingüístic de a, intento mostrar que aquesta preposició contribueix a la interpretació d’enunciats com un marcador de tòpic intern. Tot sembla indicar que aquesta és la forma més simple de derivar els «efectes d’especificitat» i d’explicar les similituds interlingüístiques entre el MDO i altres fenòmens gramaticals (com la topicalització, el doblament de clític o la reordenació).