The development of DOM in the diachrony of Catalan: (dis)similarities with respect to Spanish

Abstract

The existence of Differential Object Marking (DOM) is well-established in a number of Romance languages and varieties, such as Spanish and Romanian, where its use extends to several types of direct objects. For other languages in the Romance family, like Catalan, DOM is often considered to be absent, except for personal pro-nouns and a few other cases – at least from the perspective of normative grammar. However, in most varieties of Catalan, DOM applies to human direct objects gener-ally, including proper names, definites and some indefinites, and even occasionally extends to bare plurals or inanimates. Although an exhaustive dialectal survey on the exact prevalence of DOM has yet to be carried out, it is clear that it is widespread and features in many dialects. While one might initially assume that this is the result of the influence of Spanish, such instances (at least partially) might in fact have arisen from the internal evolution of Catalan. Crucially, instances of DOM were remarka-bly abundant in Old Catalan, although this has sometimes gone quite unnoticed. That is, instances of DOM with proper names and human NPs are found in earlier Catalan texts (in the 13th to 15th centuries), and increase quite significantly from the 16th century on, reaching very high percentages of occurrences in some texts. The aim of this paper is to offer an account of the emergence and development of DOM in Catalan over time, showing the commonalities with neighbouring Spanish, as well as the important differences that distinguish these two languages. This is a large corpus study, based on the Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic, and comprising the period from the first written texts to the 16th century, with some notes on the 17th century too.