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.

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.

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.

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).