Differential object marking in Catalan: where do we come from and where do we go to?

Abstract

In this paper we analyse Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Catalan both from the point of view of its diachronic evolution and from the perspective of its current scope across Catalan dialects nowadays. First, our large-scale corpus study of Old Catalan shows that the phenomenon already existed in previous stages of the language (with personal pronouns, personal names, and NPs), so that, in this sense, it can be considered a genuine phenomenon. However, diachronic data also indicate very clearly that from the 16th century onwards, when the influence of Spanish became an increasingly severe reality, the percentage of use of the preposition a in front of DOs increased exponentially.

Although at the beginning of the 20th century the publication of the first Catalan prescriptive grammar meant a before and after in the appearance of the phenomenon in formal written texts, the fact is that the Catalan-speaking community has never get rid of this morphosyntactic resource, quite the opposite. This is amply confirmed by a large-scale study on the scope of the phenomenon in all Catalan dialects, based on individual interviews with around 400 speakers, who were asked to carry out both a sentence production task and a grammaticality judgment task.