(37) a. *Deffensen a Déu provant que, com a just, no* defend.prs.3pl dom God proving that, as fair, no *castiga a nengú sens culpa* punish.prs.3sg dom nobody without fault 'They defend God, proving that since he is fair, he doesn't punish anybody who is not guilty.'

(16th c., Conques, *Job*, 37)

b. *offenien greument a Déu* offend.ipfv.3pl gravely dom God 'They used to offend God gravely.'

(16th c., *Antiquitats* I, 57)

Turning now to human definite NPs, Table 3 shows that, although the absence of marking is general in the earlier period of Old Catalan, DOM has a modest but not insignificant presence, especially from the 15th century onwards and mainly in texts from the Valencian area (39).10 In the 14th century, only very scarce occurrences of DOM with human definite NPs are attested (38).

(38) a. *Volem anar a la vila e estaylarem al* want.prs.1pl go.inf to the town and isolate.fut.1pl dom.the *rey, que no y pusca entrar ost.* king that not there can.sbjv.prs.3sg enter.inf army 'We want to go to the town and isolate the king so that no army can enter there.'

(14th c., Jaume I, *Fets*, f. 39v)

b. *e regonech al dit mercader* and recognize.pst.3sg dom.the mentioned trader 'And he recognized the mentioned trader.' (14th c., *Epistolari* Ic, letter 90, written in València)

**10** As an anonymous reviewer notes, throughout the 15th century the Valencia area was more influential than Catalonia in economic and political terms, and gave rise to many of the greater literary achievements (e.g. the chivalric novel *Tirant lo Blanc*) and authors (e.g. the poets Ausiàs March and Jordi de Sant Jordi) in the period. This might well have influenced literary production in the other areas of the Catalan-speaking countries, although it is difficult to make a similar claim when it comes to personal letters or other text types. While we agree that an analysis of the textual transmission at that time would be very interesting, it is outside the scope of the current paper.

(39) a. *lo rey près per la mà a l' ermità* the king take.pst.3sg by his hand dom the hermit 'The king took the hermit by his hand.' (15th c., Martorell, *Tirant*, 102) b. *yo penjaré als jurats* I hang.fut.1sg dom.the jurors

'I will hang the jurors.'

(15th c., *Epistolari* IIa, letter 10, written in València)

Finally, as observed with the previous categories, there is a sharp change in the 16th century, when the presence of DOM with human definite NPs increases significantly (40), still with greater frequency in the Valencian texts (41):

(40) a. *lo prevera interrogarà primerament a l' home* the priest interrogate.fut.3sg firstly dom the man 'The priest will first interrogate the man.' (16th c., *Illes* XVI–23, 444) b. *Per què donchs sosté als affligits?* why then sustain.prs.3sg dom.the heartbroken.pl 'Why then does he support the heartbroken?' (16th c., Conques, *Job*, 42) c. *animant als cavallés romans* cheer.up.ger dom.the knights Roman 'Cheering up the Roman knights.' (16th c., *Grandeses*, 151) (41) a. *Jo crech que a[u]rà vists a mos* I think.prs.1sg that have.fut.3sg11 seen.m.pl dom my *fills, puys són estats en Barcelona* children since be.3pl been.m.pl in Barcelona 'I think that you will have seen my children, since they have been to Barcelona.' (16th c., Liori i Requesens, *Epistolaris*, letter 12, written in València) b. *Ý per ospedar a estos senyós* and for host.inf dom these men 'And because I was hosting these men.'

> (16th c., Liori i Requesens, *Epistolaris*, letter 11, written in Molins de Rei, Catalonia)

The overall evolution of DOM with human definite NPs in the diachrony of Catalan is substantially different from what has been observed for Spanish, where DOM with this type of object has had a significant presence from the earliest texts and exceeds 50% of cases as early as the 14th century (Laca 2006, 443).

Lower in the hierarchies that predict the emergence and extension of DOM cross-linguistically (1)–(2), we find human indefinites. In Old Catalan, these types of objects typically appear without DOM, as shown in Table 3. In those few cases where the marking is present (42), the object is usually specific, as predicted in the hierarchies. Example (42c) is particularly illustrative here, in that it shows the contrast in the use of DOM for the first indefinite, the referent of which is extensively specified by a series of appositions, and the second one ('another Moor captain'), which is left unspecified and therefore bears no DOM:

(15th c., *Lleida* IId, f. 4r)

**11** This verb, inflected in the 3rd person singular, refers to a 2nd person (polite form *vostè*).

c. *lo duch de Segorb sentencià en Segorb* the duke of Segorb sentence.pst.3sg in Segorb *a hun moro, que era alamí de Algar,* dom a Moor who be.ipfv.3sg officer of Algar *que·s deÿa Caravan, qui era lo principal* who-refl say.ipfv.3sg Caravan who be.ipfv.3sg the principal *de la muntanya de Spatan ab dos fills seus; of* the mountain of Spatan with two sons his *y hun alter moro capità*. and a other Moor captain 'The duke of Segorb sentenced in Segorb a Moor, who was officer of Algar, who was named Caravan, who was the principal of the mountain of Spatan, with two of his sons; and another Moor captain.' (16th c., *Antiquitats* I, 11)

In this respect, then, Old Catalan behaves like Old Spanish, where indefinites used to lack DOM (Laca 2006, 443, 458–460).

As for bare (singular and plural) NPs, at the bottom of the definiteness/specificity scale (2), DOM is not an option in Old Catalan. There are only three examples in our corpus, from the 16th century and from Valencian texts. In all three cases, other factors (such as word order alterations) co-occur and may explain the use of DOM. For example, in (43) we see the presence of a complement breaking the adjacency between the verb and the direct object. On the other hand, in Spanish, DOM with this type of objects appears "sporadically since the 15th century" [our translation] (Laca 2006, 445).

(43) *e*n *Barcelona no admètan per la vida a home* in Barcelona not admit.prs.3pl for the life dom man *perquè sia molt rich si altres calitats convenients ad aquell estament li falten*  'In Barcelona they don't admit at all man only because he is very rich, if he lacks any other of the required qualities.'

(16th c., Despuig, *Col·loquis*, 125)

If we now focus on the animacy scale (1), we conclude that, with the exception of objects with human referents, Old Catalan disallows DOM. Accordingly, whereas in the diachrony of Spanish DOM with animate direct objects was possible from the 14th century (Laca 2006, 444–445), this is not the case in Catalan. Only very few examples are found, all of which are from the 16th century when, as previously mentioned, there was a significant Spanish influence on Catalan. Additionally, note that in example (44), other factors, including the absence of a verb and the parallelism with an obligatorily marked personal pronoun, are also relevant factors:

(44) *ý à· ns dotat a nosaltres de més capacitat* and has cl.acc.1pl endowed dom us of more capacity *ý saber que a les bèsties del camp*  and wisdom than dom the beasts of.the countryside '[God] has endowed us with more capacity and wisdom than he has endowed the beasts of the countryside.'

(16th c., Conques, *Job*, 86)

Another difference between DOM in Catalan and Spanish relates to inanimate proper names, that is, place names. In Spanish 'from the earliest texts DOM appears optionally with proper names referring to inanimates, in particular place names' (Laca 2006, 450) [our translation], reaching 38% of occurrences in the *Cid* and 100% (from a small total amount) in the *Quijote* and *Lucanor* (cf. also Caro Reina 2020, 245–247). In Old Catalan, however, DOM with place names is not possible, barring a few examples, all of which come from the 16th century, in the Valencian area:

(45) a. *conquistà Almeria, a Tortosa ý la* conquer.pst.3sg Almeria, dom Tortosa and the *antiga ý populosa Lleyda* ancient and populated Lleida 'He conquered Almeria, Tortosa and the ancient and populated Lleida.' (16th c., Despuig, *Col·loquis*, 96) b. *lo ardit que tingueren los grechs per a* the trick that have.pst.3pl the Greek.pl to *pèndrer a Troya* take.inf dom Troy 'The trick that the Greek had to take Troy.' (16th c., Despuig, *Col·loquis*, 119) c. *E aprés de haver saquejat a Gandia* and after of have.inf sacked dom Gandia *ý Oliva, los de Oriola tornaren-se·n ab molta roba que havien pres*. and Oliva 'And after having sacked Gandia and Oliva, the people from Oriola went back with a lot of clothes they had taken.'

(16th c., *Antiquitats* I, 69)

With other types of inanimates, DOM in Old Catalan is very marginal (46) and is limited to contexts in which its absence would result in ambiguity between the subject and the object interpretation. The marginality of DOM with inanimates (not including place names) is thus similar in Old Catalan and Old Spanish, where such examples were also very rare (Laca 2006, 450).

(46) a. *lo voler amant, ahirant al membrar*  the will love.ger, irritate.ger dom.the memory *e al entendre.* and dom.the understanding 'Loving the will, irritating the memory and the understanding.' (13th c., Llull, *Doctrina* I, 151) b. *La sapiència ý felicitat […] vens ý* the wisdom and happiness beat.prs.3sg and *avantaja també a les perles ý pedres precioses* overtake.prs.3sg also dom the pearls and gems precious 'The wisdom and happiness beats and overtakes also the pearls and precious gems.'

(16th c., Conques, *Job*, 74)

In sum, our corpus study shows that the emergence and development of DOM in the diachrony of Catalan follows the predictions in terms of prominence based on the person/animacy and definiteness/specificity hierarchies, going from personal pronouns to categories lower down the hierarchies in (1)–(2).12 This evolution thus resembles in general terms the evolution of DOM in Spanish. However, the paths of extension of DOM in both languages diverge in many respects too, such as chronology and extension to a wider or narrower range of categories. Broadly speaking, DOM always consolidates and extends to different categories earlier in Old Spanish than in Old Catalan.13At the same time, it is remarkable – as an anonymous reviewer suggests – that not even very low categories, such as

**12** In particular, Pineda (in press a) concludes that following combined scale of definiteness and animacy is the one regulating the emergence and expansion of DOM in the diachrony of Catalan:

(i) personal pronouns > human proper names (personal names) > human definite NPs > human indefinite NPs > deity names > relatives and interrogatives [excluded from this paper] > inanimate proper names (place names) > animate NPs > inanimate NPs > human bare NPs

**13** Differences are also found in terms of the role and importance of the different semantic and contextual triggering factors (e.g. lexical type of verb, dislocation, etc.), which are analyzed in (Pineda in press a; b).

indefinites and inanimates, are entirely free of DOM. Thus, although DOM is far less extended than in Spanish in quantitative terms, it is not the case to the same extent in qualitative terms.

This study sheds light on the question of whether DOM in Catalan has undergone a process of narrowing – as argued by Dalrymple/Nikolaeva (2011, 212–213), based on the allegedly reduced use of DOM according to prescriptive grammar – or, alternatively, if the contemporary non-prescriptive uses in Section 3 (examples 20–27) represent the continuation of medieval patterns. We have shown that DOM was a syntactic resource present in the language in the 13th–15th centuries, long before the influence of Spanish was relevant. It is therefore difficult to attribute the spread of this phenomenon exclusively to an external influence – recall Salvador's and Pérez Saldanya's words at the end of Section 3. From the late 15th to the early 16th century, the sociolinguistic pressure from Spanish unquestionably played a significant role. It is during that time that the percentage of DOM increases exponentially across all types of objects, both with personal pronouns and for proper names and human NPs. We conclude that DOM is (at least partially) a phenomenon native to Catalan, and that the influence of Spanish, from the late 15th and the early 16th century onwards, was probably more quantitative than qualitative. It is impossible to determine how DOM would have evolved in Catalan in the absence of any influence from Spanish, but in any case one should take into account that: (i) DOM is a phenomenon that exists in many very different languages of the world, including the Romance family; (ii) DOM already existed in Catalan before the Spanish influence began; and (iii) in the languages of the world the cases of retraction of a syntactic phenomenon like this one are particularly scarce, whereas the general pattern is the progressive enlargement of the set of contexts with DOM following the hierarchies in (1)–(2) (cf. Bossong 1991, 152–153; Aissen 2003, 472, fn. 33 and also Dalrympe/Nikolaeva 2011, 211–215).

# **5 Concluding remarks**

We have provided a comprehensive picture of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Catalan, analyzing its diachronic evolution as well as its scope in present-day language, and we have been able to draw significant conclusions from our discussion.

Following the criteria established by Thomason (2001, 93–94) to determine whether a linguistic change can be considered the result of exogenous factors or of endogenous development, the presence of DOM in Old Catalan texts which precede the impact of Spanish leads us to the conclusion that DOM is (at least partially) a

phenomenon native to Catalan (the increase of DOM with different objects in the 16th and the 17th century owing to the influence of Spanish not withstanding).

At the same time, however, and in accordance with the fact that the phenomenon was already present in the language before the period of external influence of Spanish, what occurred in Catalan could be a case of what Heine/ Kuteva (2003, 539; 2010, 86) term "replica grammaticalization" – we thank Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez (p.c.) for having suggested this possibility to us. This type of grammaticalization is triggered by language contact, where a language adopts not a category or a grammatical concept that it did not have until then, but a grammaticalization process existing in another language: in the case under study, Catalan (where DOM already existed but with many constraints) would have adopted the grammaticalization process of DOM existing in Spanish and would thus have made of DOM a grammatical resource with a much wider scope. This means that because of the contact with Spanish, Catalan could have given to DOM a new grammatical sense, as a marker for a wider range of DOs.

Although there are no studies of DOM in Catalan after the 17th century, and a systematic Catalan dialect survey remains to be carried out, our observations on spontaneous speech and language usage in the media over the past few years indicate that Catalan DOM has continued to spread towards less-prototypical categories: current uses of DOM with indefinites (both specific and non-specific), bare plurals or even some inanimate NPs can be found, as exemplified in Section 3.14 Thus, we argue that the diachronic and contemporary data provided in this study call into question Dalrymple/Nikolaeva's (2011, 212–213) suggestion that the evolution of DOM in Catalan is an instance of the "narrowing" of DOM.15 We hope that this paper has shed some light on the nature of DOM in Catalan, one of the most controversial – and interesting – phenomena in the (descriptive and prescriptive) grammar of this language.

**14** A similar evolution is attested in Neapolitan: in present-day use, and from the 19th century, DOM extends to animate and individuated direct objects, whereas in Old Neapolitan the phenomenon was far more restricted, subject to several lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors (Ledgeway 2009, 831; cf. also Sornicola 1997).

**15** When reviewing the existing literature on DOM in Old Catalan, also Escandell Vidal (2009, 842), citing Bossong (1983/1984, 11), suggested: "The diachronic data suggest that DOM is not necessarily a transfer from Spanish and that the normative ban against it has given rise to a system in which 'the formerly far more widespread use of the preposition a with the direct object has been reduced to the absolute minimum (the free pronoun)' [...]. If this view is correct, what the standardization did was to promote an artificial regression of DOM".

# **Bibliography**

Heine, Bernd/Kuteva, Tania, *Contact and grammaticalization*, in: Hickey, Raymond (ed.), *The handbook of language contact*, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 86–105.

Hualde, José Ignacio, *Catalan*, London, Routledge, 2012.

Iemmolo, Giorgio, *Topicality and Differential Object Marking. Evidence from Romance and beyond*, Studies in Language 34:2 (2010), 239–272.

Laca, Brenda, *El objeto directo. La marcación preposicional*, in: Company Company, Concepción (ed.), *Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española. Primera parte: La frase verbal*, vol. 1, México DF, UNAM/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006, 423–475.

Ledgeway, Adam, *Grammatica diacronica del napoletano*, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 2009.

Leonetti, Manuel, *Specificity in clitic doubling and Differential Object Marking*, Probus 20:1 (2008), 33–66.

López, Luis, *Indefinite objects. Scrambling, choice functions, and differential marking*, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2012.

Meier, Harri, *O problema do acusativo preposicional no catalão*, Boletim de Filologia 8 (1947), 237–260.

Meier, Harri, *Sobre as origens do acusativo preposicional nas línguas românicas*, in: Meier, Harri (ed.), *Ensaios de filologia românica*, Lisboa, Edição da "Revista de Portugal", 1948, 115–164.

Mestres, Josep M., et al. (edd.), *Manual d'estil. La redacció i l'edició de textos*, Vic, Eumo, 1995.

Næss, Åshild, *What markedness marks. The markedness problem with direct objects*, Lingua 114:9 (2004), 1186–1212.

Pensado, Carmen, *El complemento directo preposicional. Estado de la cuestión y bibliografía comentada*, in: Pensado, Carmen (ed.), *El complemento directo preposicional*, Madrid, Visor, 1995, 11–59.

Perera i Parramon, Joan, *Contribució a l'estudi de les preposicions en el "Tirant lo Blanch" (primera part)*, Llengua & Literatura 1 (1986), 51–109.

Pineda, Anna, *Acostament al marcatge diferencial d'objecte als inicis del català modern*, eHumanista/IVITRA 14 (2018), 570–596.

Pineda, Anna, *Aspectes de la transivititat en els inicis del català modern*, Caplletra 66 (2019), 207–236.

Pineda, Anna, *El complement directe (I). El marcatge diferencial d'objecte*, in: Martines, Josep/ Pérez, Saldanya/Manuel Rigau, Gemma (edd.), *Gramàtica del català antic*, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, John Benjamins, in press a.

Pineda, Anna, *El complement directe (II). Aspectes de la transitivitat*, in: Martines, Josep/Pérez, Saldanya/Manuel Rigau, Gemma (edd.), *Gramàtica del català antic*, Barcelona, John Benjamins, in press b.

Rohlfs, Gerhard, *Autour de l'accusatif prépositionnel dans les langues romanes*, Revue de Linguistique Romane 35 (1971), 312–334.

Rohlfs, Gerhard, *Panorama de l'accusatif prépositionnel en Italie*, Studii și Cercetări Lingvistice 24 (1973), 617–621.

Ruaix i Vinyet, Josep, *El català/2. Morfología i sintaxi*, Moià, Ed. Ruaix, 1985.

Silverstein, Michael, *Hierarchy of features and ergativity*, in: Dixon, Robert M.W. (ed.), *Grammatical categories in Australian languages*, Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1976, 112–171.

# Senta Zeugin **DOM in Modern Catalan varieties**

An empirical study based on acceptability judgment tasks

**Abstract:** This paper examines the current situation of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in the major Catalan varieties, focusing on the animacy of the direct object. In the past, Catalan standard grammar has advocated for very conservative rules for applying DOM, and thus a substantial divergence between spoken language and standard grammar was created. Nowadays, standard Catalan seems to accept DOM more readily, but still falls short of the wide range of uses found in Catalan dialects. Hence, this paper relies on experimental methods (i.e. an acceptability judgment task with a 2x3 within-subjects design) to analyze the situation found in the major Catalan dialects, i.e. Central Catalan, North-Western Catalan, Valencian and Majorcan. The experiment focuses on direct objects in definite noun phrases and the test sentences were manipulated for presence/absence of DOM and three degrees of animacy (human, animal, inanimate). Results suggest that for human direct objects in noun phrases the use of DOM is as well accepted as the unmarked version, which contradicts what is claimed by Catalan standard grammars. However, the unmarked version is slightly preferable in the case of animals and clearly preferable for inanimate objects.

**Keywords:** Differential Object Marking (DOM), Catalan, experimental linguistics, acceptability judgment tasks, diatopic variation

# **1 Introduction**

For some languages, research into DOM is already quite advanced, whereas for others, much ground remains to be covered. One such language is Catalan. Although an increasing number of studies on DOM have been published in recent years, there is still more to discover about the phenomenon. This is one of the

**Acknowledgements:** This article is based largely on the author's MA-Thesis (Zeugin 2017). I'd like to thank two anonymous reviewers as well as Albert Wall, Johannes Kabatek and John Barlow for their comments and suggestions. I am also very grateful to all the native speakers who reviewed the material for the experiment as well as everyone who participated in the experiment itself.

**Senta Zeugin,** University of Zurich<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
main reasons why the experiment described in this article takes Catalan and its main varieties as its focus.

Historically, the view of Catalan authors on DOM, which is often seen as a prototypical feature of neighbouring Spanish, has been rather biased and less than favourable. For the most part it was regarded as a mere alien structure, existing only because of language contact, and thus, further studies were not deemed necessary.1 However, this view has not been shared by everyone, and there have been a few early defenders of DOM as an inherent Catalan feature. Meier (1945) shows that already in the earlier stages of Catalan, DOM had spread to varying degrees throughout its territories, citing examples from authors such as Bernat Metge and Sant Vicent Ferrer (both 14th/15th century) and Jacint Verdaguer (19th century). Geographical differences can be explained, as Müller (1971) notes, as a result of the gradual loss of the Latin case system (favouring the accusative as the universal case), which for Catalan seemed to start in the south of the territory and spread slowly towards the north. Thus, according to Müller (1971), it should come as no surprise that a text from Valencia (Sant Vincent Ferrer) contains more occurrences of DOM than a contemporary work from Barcelona (Metge). The author goes on to argue that the late starting point for the loss of the Latin case system seems to lie at the root of the much narrower expansion of DOM usage in Catalan compared to Spanish, where this loss began about a century earlier. Further confirmation of the autonomous origins of Catalan DOM can be found in more recent studies, for example by Irimia/Pineda (2019). The authors underline fundamental differences between Spanish and Catalan DOM and cite examples from texts as early as the 14th century.

As a result of this change of perception, the study of Catalan DOM has become more detailed and objective over the years. For example, Rohlfs (1971) and later Pensado (1995), Wheeler/Yates/Dohls (1999) and Sancho Cremades (2008) present detailed characterizations, adding numerous examples of DOM in contexts that were not described in earlier works. Thus, they demonstrate, contrary to what until then had often been claimed by Catalan linguists and to what Catalan normative works suggested, that DOM was actually being used much

**1** One of the defenders of this viewpoint was Par (1923, 153), who stated that: "En català modern jamay lo règim directe porta la preposició 'a', quan aquell es un nom. Mes ab los pronoms personals tònichs s'hi es introduhida, sens dubte per influencia castellana; barbarisme qui es acceptat, àdhuch per qualques gramàtichs" ('In Modern Catalan, the direct object in the form of a noun is never marked by the preposition *a*. However, it is used with strong personal pronouns, without a doubt due to Castilian influence; a barbarism that is, nonetheless, accepted by some grammarians' [translation SZ]). Badia Margarit's (1962) opinion is not quite so extreme and, similarly to Pompeu Fabra (1933), he describes various permissible contexts for DOM. However, both authors do still urge to avoid it and to use any other means whenever possible.

more widely. The view that DOM in Catalan is nothing more than a contamination from Spanish has been questioned for some time and is considered outdated. In separating the two phenomena and recognizing the historic and synchronic individuality of Catalan DOM, a need for a detailed description of its evolution and present occurrence arises. And it is in this latter area of investigation that the current paper seeks to contribute to the bigger picture of DOM in Catalan in general and its major dialects in particular.

For this purpose, an experiment was conducted, consisting of an acceptability judgment task in which participants were asked to evaluate 60 sentences, presented to them in a random order. Before describing the experiment, some background information on the situation of DOM in the major Catalan dialects will be provided. Therefore, Section 2 contains an overview of the status of DOM in standard Catalan as well as a brief introduction to the diatopic study of DOM in four major Catalan dialects. The remaining Sections will focus on the experiment itself, starting with its method and general setup in Section 3, and the design of the test sentences in Section 4. Subsequently, Section 5 covers the procedure of the experiment as well as relevant information about the participants themselves. Lastly, in Section 6, the results from the different parts of the experiment will be discussed, in each case by first focusing on the regions individually and then looking at all the dialects together. Section 7 then presents conclusions, including some observations on possible future research.

### **2 DOM: standard Catalan versus Catalan dialects**

When studying the behaviour of dialects, what is predominantly of interest is the spoken language, considering that this is where diatopic variation usually manifests itself. In order to establish such variations, the dialects themselves can be compared. An additional source of insight is the contrast of each dialect with the established standard version of the respective language. In most languages, if not all, there is a certain divergence between standard and everyday language as a natural result of their individual purposes. Additionally, in the case of Catalan, the standard language has served as a means of distinguishing Catalan itself more clearly from neighbouring Spanish, as can be seen, for example, in the works of Fabra (1933) and Badia Margarit (1962). Thus, differences between the standard and the spoken language might be more pronounced in Catalan2 than

**2** Sancho Cremades (2008) confirms the existence of a considerable gap between standard and spoken language in his chapter in the *Gramàtica del català contemporani*.

in other languages, and this suggests that it might be useful to take a brief look at the process of linguistic normalization and its important role in the creation of standard Catalan.3

During a long time the normative version of Catalan, i.e. standard Catalan, was defined in three works by Pompeu Fabra from the beginning of the 20th century: the *Normes ortogràfiques*, published in 1913, the *Gramática catalana* from 1918 and the *Diccionari general de la llengua catalana* from 1931 (cf. Costa Carreras 2001). Especially the grammar from 1918, and later on its updated version from 1933, was regarded as normative up until very recently, as Costa Carreras (2001) notes.

Fabra deemed only a very limited number of contexts acceptable territory for DOM, and suggested to avoid it whenever possible. Among the very limited permitted uses in Fabra (1933) is the marking of strong personal pronouns, elements like *tots*, *tothom* and *el qual*, as well as expressions of reciprocity (*l'un a l'altre*) plus cases of possible ambiguity. A rather problematic aspect of Fabra's standard Catalan was the fact that he based it predominantly on the Central Catalan dialect and thus did not pay heed to the wide spectrum of Catalan dialects.4 Furthermore, standard Catalan, having its origins in about 1918, did not receive a

**3** Linguistic normalization (*normalització lingüística*) is a phrase coined by Catalan sociolinguists, referring to the joint processes of establishing a linguistic standard, or norm, for a certain language (*normativització*), and the extension of this language to all registers and contexts (*extensió social*) (cf. Kremnitz 1979; Vallverdú 1979; Lagarde 2009). In the case of Catalan, the process of normalization was not without its difficulties. At the beginning of the 18th century after the War of the Spanish Succession, Catalan was substituted by Spanish as the official language of Catalonia. During the following two centuries Catalan first experienced a significant decline in usage, and later on near the end of the 19th century, led by a cultural renaissance, a surge in popularity (cf. Vallverdú 1979). Fueled by constant political tension, the Catalan-speaking, antimonarchist bourgeoisie saw the potential of conserving and reanimating their mother tongue, in order to gain the support of the working class population. With this historical background, the linguistic normalization of Catalan started at the beginning of the 20th century, particularly with the works of Pompeu Fabra. Shortly after, during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) and from 1939 on under Franco, any languages other than Castilian Spanish were prohibited (cf. Kremnitz 1979). In spite of all the setbacks, the Catalan normalization process never came to a complete stop. Still, it wasn't until the 1970s that it was able to run much more smoothly. Furthermore, this historical background explains some of the political tension that still surrounds Catalan today and the insistence of some of the older grammars on distancing Catalan as far as possible from Spanish. **4** Fabra's initial idea was to create a much more inclusive standard, striving to use not only the Central dialect, but to let it be influenced and moulded by the varieties of the other regions, all the while getting rid of any vestiges of Spanish (cf. Fabra 1908). Colón Domènech (2009, 23) in-

dicates that, while Fabra's intentions might have been good initially, in the end he developed a standard based only on one dialect: "Malgrat una pretesa voluntat de fer un estàndard acumulatiu, l'estàndard en realitat és restrictiu; és a dir, 'particular'" ('Despite the intention of creating a cumulative standard, the standard is actually restrictive, or rather, 'particular'' [translation SZ]).

comprehensive update for almost a century until the publication in 2016 of the *Gramàtica de la llengua catalana*, the new normative grammar of the *Institut d'Estudis Catalans* (IEC).

As far as DOM is concerned, this new normative work generally seems to follow in the footsteps of Fabra, stating that, as a rule, the direct object does not require a preposition. Also, in most of the permitted contexts for DOM, it appears to concur with Fabra, while providing much more detailed explanations and pointing out several exceptions. The authors of this recent grammar include a number of new permitted contexts for DOM, for example, when the order of a sentence has been changed by dislocations. It appears that with this new grammar, the normative authorities (nowadays the IEC) have slowly come around to recognizing the existence and validity of DOM as a Catalan phenomenon. The authors even go so far as to refer to the presence of diatopic variation, albeit without providing further details. Nevertheless, a look at the regional grammars and studies on the subject suggests that the updated standard language is still somewhat removed from the real situation of the spoken language throughout the territory.

**Illustration 1:** The Catalan dialects5.

**5** Illustration 1: Wikimedia CC BY-SA 2.5; annotations of dialect names [SZ]. Names of the dialects are consistent with those used in this article. In the case of Majorcan it should be noted that this

In the remainder of this Section, a brief overview of the situation of DOM in the four major Catalan dialects will be presented. As already mentioned, the Central Catalan dialect was the general basis for the development of the Catalan standard in the early 20th century. An analysis of spoken Central Catalan can be found in Escandell Vidal (2009). Her study illustrates that even the most closely related dialect diverges to a certain degree from the standard language, in the case of DOM most often concerning its use with proper names, human definite noun phrases and occasional non-human animate ones.6 Still, the behaviour of Central Catalan is somewhat similar to standard Catalan, whereas especially in Majorcan and Valencian the extension of DOM is much greater than what is considered permissible in the general Catalan standard and also in the respective regional standards.

For the Balearic dialect, Moll (1979) proposes similar guidelines to those of Fabra's grammar, while at the same time introducing one of the earliest recognized examples of DOM with inanimate objects,7 a use that certainly goes beyond any normative prescriptions. In more recent studies, such as Wheeler/Yates/ Dols (1999) or Escandell Vidal (2009), the Majorcan situation is addressed in even greater detail. The latter author, echoing a previous study by Rohlfs (1971), emphasizes that DOM in Majorcan is found primarily in dislocated positions. According to Escandell Vidal (2009), it seems that not only intrinsic factors of the direct object, such as animacy and definiteness, have an impact on the use of DOM in Majorcan, but also others like topicality and information structure.

In contrast to Majorcan, to which many studies concentrating on DOM are dedicated, for North-Western Catalan there is much less information available. One of the few studies, by Boladeras Taché (2011), is very inconclusive concerning the contexts where DOM can be found. Nonetheless, the author does allude to one notable aspect, which itself probably hinders a more precise examination: the fact that in North-Western Catalan marked and unmarked objects, in combination with the definite article, can sound the same.

On Valencian, on the other hand, much more information can be found, and it tends to suggest a range of contexts for DOM, which goes beyond the uses permitted in the new normative grammar by the IEC. There are examples such as *Hem vist com perseguia un policia a un lladre* (AVL 2006, 303) that show strong

doesn't include the dialects spoken on Ibiza or Menorca. Considering that all participants in the experiment in question came from the island of Majorca, the more generic term Balearic Catalan seemed inappropriate in this instance.

**6** Escandell Vidal (2009, 840) cites examples like *Les monges no estimen a/ana les nenes* and *Veuré a la Maria.*

**7** The example from Moll (1979, 203) is: *Colliules, a les peres que ja són madures*.

parallels to the evolution found in Spanish DOM. Sancho Cremades (1995) confirms the similarity of Valencian to Spanish DOM, and adds that it is usually associated with direct objects denoting a person, the capacity of an object to feel the action described by the verb, or topicality. The only restriction noted by Sancho Cremades (1995, 199) is the need for the object to be clearly determined (*no veig als xiquets* [. . .] vs*. he trobat uns xiquets* [. . .]). However, considering the example cited above, even this restriction doesn't always seem to hold. A further interesting aspect is the fact that as early as the 15th century, there were occurrences of DOM in Valencian, as several examples found in the Sermons of Sant Vicent Ferrer demonstrate (*Senyor, yo bé am mon pare, mas més am a vós* cf. Meier 1945, 239).

### **3 The experiment: main aspects and methodology**

As noted in the Introduction, the experiment discussed in this paper consisted of an acceptability judgment task that examined the present use of DOM in Catalan. Thus, the judgments of native Catalan speakers concerning the presence or absence of DOM in given sentences were studied. One of the important aspects of a more detailed description of DOM usage nowadays, and therefore one of the three main aspects investigated in this experiment, is diatopic variety. The geographic distribution of Catalan-speaking regions is considerable. The largest territory can be found in Spain, but there are also areas in France (Roussillon) and Italy (Alghero, Sardinia), resulting in contact situations with at least four different romance languages. Combined with the relative isolation of the Balearic Islands, this leads to a variety of different geographical situations as well as different language contact situations. The possible regional differences are confirmed by some of the previously cited literature, e.g. regional grammars, focusing on the major dialects of Catalan.

Consequently, 'regional variation' as a first major aspect was examined by distributing the experiment across the regions of the six major Catalan dialects. In addition to the regional varieties, the experiment focused on two further aspects: 'animacy' and, to a lesser degree, 'position'. Including both of these factors in the same test sentence was not feasible, because it would have rendered it impossible to determine which one was more influential. Therefore, the experiment was divided into two parts, each centring around one main aspect and thus avoided any conflict between them. Furthermore, since the sentences for both parts differed in structure, it was expected that participants would not easily deduce what linguistic aspect the experiment was focusing on. Ideally, participants evaluated the test sentences spontaneously and without thinking about them extensively. As mentioned, a total of 60 randomly allocated sentences were given to each participant, divided into two groups of 30, that is, for the two parts of the experiment. Both parts were designed using the Latin Squares method, with six individual conditions distributed across six lists and five repetitions, leading to 30 test sentences per experiment part.

The first part was created around 'animacy', one of the main parameters generally used to determine different DOM-configurations.8 The focus lay on the animacy of the direct object in noun phrases. In accordance with the basic animacy scale shown below (cf., for example, von Heusinger/Kaiser 2005, 37), the degree of animacy of the direct object was manipulated to see whether this had an effect on the acceptability of the test sentences.

Animacy scale: human > animate > inanimate

By combining this scale with the presence or absence of the DOM marker *a*, six categories (conditions) were created, each of which was represented by the same number of test sentences. The distribution of the conditions is shown in Table 1 below.

**Table 1:** Conditions for 'animacy'.

Whereas the main focus of the whole experiment was on this first part about the animacy of the direct object in combination with DOM, the sentences from the second part were mostly used as distractors. With this goal in mind, the chosen sentence structure clearly differed from the one in the first part, as will be seen later on. Nevertheless, in an effort to glean further information on the behaviour of the phenomenon in Catalan, DOM was also included. Thus, the third main aspect to be considered was 'position', or, more specifically, the influence of a change in the position of the pronominal direct object and its resulting combination with clitic doubling and DOM on the acceptability of the test sentence. As presented in Table 2, the first positional category was topicalization, bearing in mind that the literature suggests it to be highly susceptible to co-occurrence

**8** Cf., for example, Bossong (1991), von Heusinger/Kaiser (2005) or Aissen (2003).

with DOM.9 Secondly, dislocation to the right was chosen, which seems to be a frequent partner with DOM, particularly in Majorcan (as indicated by Escandell Vidal 2009). Unfortunately, due to the design of the experiment and the need for a rigorous uniformity of the structure of the test sentences, it was not possible to use a total dislocation to the right, as would have been the ideal case. This has to be taken into account when analyzing the results of the second part of the experiment. In Catalan, both types of dislocation go hand in hand with the introduction of a strong personal pronoun, which is where DOM comes into play. As a third category for the factor 'position', the most basic sentence type was used, with neither dislocation nor clitic doubling, and thus also without DOM. In combining these three positional categories with a change between 2nd and 3rd person singular pronouns, six conditions were again created, as can be seen in Table 2.

**Table 2:** Conditions for 'position'.

Following the characteristics that they represent, each condition shown in Tables 1 and 2 corresponds to a sentence, or rather, a variation of a test sentence. Consequently, a test sentence always had six variations. Naturally, a participant was not asked to evaluate all of these six variations but just one of them, thus avoiding interference caused by lexical repetition and cross-sentence judgments. As can be seen in Table 3, for the Latin Squares method with six conditions per test sentence, six different lists have to be created, each containing only one of the conditions per test sentence. Furthermore, every condition needs to appear the same number of times in each list, which guarantees the most equal distribution. Consequently, after six sentences, all of them with six variations, every list includes each condition exactly once.

In order to achieve reliable results, it is necessary to gather as much data as possible, thus making it tempting to present participants with a huge number of test sentences. Doing so would be risky and most likely result in the loss of many participants due to boredom. Therefore, a compromise between maximal data gain and minimal loss of participants had to be reached. Accordingly, a total of

**9** Cf., for example, Rohlfs (1971) and Pensado (1995).

**Table 3:** Latin Squares.

60 sentences (each with its six respective variations) were created, 30 per experiment part. In other words, for each of the experiment parts Table 3 was repeated five times, leaving every participant to evaluate each condition five times. Once created, the sentence variations were randomly distributed among the six lists, following the pattern seen in Table 3, and each participant was again randomly presented with only one of these lists, containing 60 sentences in total. Consequently, for each variation of a test sentence to be evaluated at least once (360 overall, 180 per experiment part), six different participants were needed.

### **4 The experiment: sentence construction**

In accordance with the two major aspects under investigation, 'animacy' and 'position', two sentence groups were designed with the aim of acquiring as much information about DOM in the Catalan varieties as possible. At the same time, the intention was to control for as high a number of other presumably influential factors as possible. In the following, both sentence groups will be discussed in detail. An important aspect here is the fact that the language used for all test sentences is a more or less standard version of Catalan. Taking into account every regional variation of the major Catalan dialects when constructing the sentence catalogue would not have been practical. It would have meant either designing six individual catalogues, sacrificing the possibility of comparing the results on a statistical level, or using an amalgamation of diatopical traits that could only have led to confused participants. A second aspect of a more general nature concerns word choices. Throughout both experiment parts, no verb was used more than once and none of the subjects or objects of the sentences belonging to the 'animacy' part were repeated at any point. Furthermore, only transitive verbs were used.

Concerning the first experiment part, as pointed out, the aspect under scrutiny was the animacy of the direct object in noun phrases and its influence on the perceived acceptability of a given sentence with or without DOM. Following the basic animacy scale presented in Section 3, the direct objects chosen denote humans, animals and inanimate objects. All the sentences of this group exhibit exactly the same basic structure, as can be seen in Table 4 below, consisting of an animated subject, a transitive verb in *perfet perifràstic*, a direct object in the form of a noun phrase and a circumstantial complement. Thus, the only manipulated part of the sentence was the direct object itself in terms of its degree of animacy and presence/absence of the preposition *a*, which marks DOM.

**Table 4:** Examples of test sentences for experiment part 'animacy'.

As far as the different categories of direct objects are concerned, it should be highlighted that for the human objects only terms denoting family members were used. On the one hand, this helped to keep the sentence structure as balanced as possible. On the other hand, it has been shown that, traditionally, they are more often found with DOM than other nouns. The choices for the animals of the second category of direct objects were made with the intention of avoiding the more unusual ones. Hence, the selection was limited to animals that are often found as (more or less) common pets or on a farm. Finally, for the category of inanimate direct objects, the nouns selected all designate material objects, thus steering clear of abstract concepts that can sometimes be attributed a certain amount of animacy due to metonymy.

As can be seen in Table 4, each sentence contains the possessive as part of the direct object in order to avoid possible influences of other languages such as, for example, Sardinian where the mere presence of the definite article can block the occurrence of DOM.10 The co-occurrence of possessive and definite article as seen in these sentences is an inherent characteristic of Catalan grammar.

Generally speaking, it should be emphasized that for each of these blocks of six variations of a test sentence, the direct objects were kept as similar in form as possible. Hence, the direct objects used within each of the blocks of six share the same gender and number of syllables. Each object, as well as each subject, was used only once throughout the experiment and the complements were not repeated. Furthermore, in an effort to keep possible interferences as small as possible, the gender combinations of subject and object were distributed equally.11

As was the case for the test sentences of the 'animacy' part, those for the part about the position of the direct object were also designed with care. Although this experiment part was not as central to the study as the first one, the sentences were still designed with an eye to maintaining the possibility of attaining some information about DOM in Catalan. Consequently, the sentences were all constructed with the following basic structure: omitted subject, direct object in pronominal form (depending on the condition with or without a type of dislocation and DOM), transitive verb in *perfet perifràstic*, and circumstantial complement.

**10** Blasco Ferrer (1986) and Bossong (1982) both highlight this link between presence of the definite article and absence of DOM in Sardinian.

**11** From a total of 30 sentences, 7 have both feminine subject and object, 7 both masculine subject and object, and 8 feminine subject and masculine object, and vice versa.

Compared to those of the first part, these sentences feature a different basic sentence structure, but still allow for the possibility of observing the behaviour of DOM with personal pronouns. Hence, they were regarded as adequate considering the aims of the experiment. As a second manipulation, a change between 2nd and 3rd person singular pronouns was introduced, in order to see whether there were any observable differences in acceptability. In addition, the 3rd person singular forms alternated between feminine and masculine pronouns. Similarly to the sentences of the 'animacy' part, each verb occurs only once throughout the whole experiment and the complements vary as well. Finally, it should be noted that, although the second category shows a clear movement to the right of the direct object, it does not constitute a full movement to the right-most position in the sentence, as would be the prototypical case. Examples of this more extreme movement have been found in several Catalan dialects (cf. Rohlfs 1971; Escandell Vidal 2009). Unfortunately, including this specific type of sentence was not possible due to the design of the experiment and the need to keep the overall uniformity of the test sentences intact.

One further detail remains to be mentioned here. All test sentences were designed by the article's author, who happens not to be a native speaker of Catalan. Nonetheless, prior to conducting the experiment, several native speakers from various regions checked them for their grammatical correctness.

### **5 The experiment: proceedings and participants**

The experiment described in this article was designed for online participation and was set up using OnExp, a free program from the University of Göttingen. Participants began the experiment with a short introduction, in which they were familiarized with the general aims of the survey (without mentioning explicitly the exact topic under investigation). In a second step, they were introduced to the three stages of the experiment itself. To start with, participants were asked to provide some personal information, including age, origin, and speaking habits; this information was given anonymously. They were then shown the evaluation system used for the test sentences and were given the opportunity to become accustomed to it by practicing on eight exercise sentences designed to exemplify the different acceptability levels. The evaluation system consisted of an acceptability scale ranging from 1 to 7, with 1 being equal to 'not at all natural', and 7 'totally natural'.

**Illustration 2:** Acceptability Scale.

After these introductory sections, participants continued with the third phase: the experiment itself. They were shown each test sentence, one after another, in a random order, and were asked to give their opinion on its acceptability, using the scale shown above.

Before turning to the results of the experiment, some details about the participants should be discussed briefly. While some participants were obtained through personal contacts, the majority was reached via social media. The link leading to the survey was published on Twitter and in numerous groups and sites on Facebook. In addition, multiple cultural associations and platforms in each of the regions were contacted, as well as universities and language schools. The only prerequisite was that a participant should be a native speaker of one of the major dialects of Catalan.

From the six major regions a total of 305 participants completed the survey. Out of these, unfortunately, some had to be eliminated for various reasons. Some had more than one major dialect as a first language, making it impossible to attribute their responses clearly to just one region. Others skipped several test sentences, leading to them being rejected for the overall results. Some evaluated every sentence with the same extremely high or low value (always giving a 7, for example), leading to a distortion of the final overall scores.12 Having eliminated these cases, it was also necessary to level the number of participants per list within every region, in order to avoid giving certain sentences more or less weight in the final regional analysis.  In the following Table the distribution of participants among regions and according to the more important demographic factors is displayed.

As can be seen, for the four regions of the bigger dialects, a sufficiently high number of participants were found to allow for a reliable analysis of their responses. Sadly, this was not the case for Alguerese and Rossellonese, where only a very small number of participants were registered, thus allowing for no more than the reflection of a few trends and some mostly speculative observations on their use of DOM. For the purpose of this paper, then, these have been excluded from further study, and will not be discussed in the following Section.

On the whole, it can be observed that the distribution of female and male participants is rather balanced (with the exception of Valencian, where approximately three quarters were male, and Majorcan, where two thirds were female). A significant demographic aspect was the question of whether the participants

**12** Due to their particular configuration of conditions, some of the test sentences were certain to receive very low or very high evaluations. Therefore, if a participant attributed the exact same value to every sentence, the possibility that he didn't take the experiment seriously was very high and thus he was excluded.

**Table 6:** Demographic distribution of participants.

were students of linguistics or philology in general, which could have led them to deduce the nature of the experiment more easily. As is shown in columns 4 and 5, the great majority of participants, overall and also within each region, had not attended courses pertaining to these fields of study. While most participants were between 26 and 50 years old, it is an interesting fact that for Alguerese 9 out of 11 participants were older, some considerably. Again, the number of participants here is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

Turning to the level of education of the participants, it should be noted that, both overall and within each region, there seems to be a very similar distribution of those having completed, or being in the process of completing, university studies. Overall 79.6% of participants attended university while 20.4% did not. This general distribution is reflected to a greater or lesser degree in each region (Majorcan exhibits a slightly lower percentage of university studies, and North-Western Catalan a slightly higher one).

The final category reflected in Table 6 concerns the native language of the participants. They were able to select from the following options: the six major Catalan dialects, plus Spanish, Italian, French and Sardinian. As noted above, when participants picked multiple Catalan dialects as their native language they had to be excluded from the final analysis. As for the total numbers, 56.9% (148 out of 260) only chose a Catalan dialect as their native language, whereas 43.1% (112 out of 260) indicated one or more of the other romance languages as well. Considering the individual regions, an interesting finding emerged: when participants from Central Catalan, Majorcan and North-Western Catalan were asked

**13** Philoling: Abbreviation [SZ] indicating if participants were students of linguistics and/or philology in general.

for their mother tongue, a majority chose only their dialect. Valencian speakers, however, tended to choose not only their variety, but one of the other Romance languages as well (mainly Spanish).

# **6 The experiment: results**

As noted above, each of the two main parts of the experiment should be considered separately, and for this reason the results here will be examined in different sections. The main focus will be on the first part of the experiment, containing the test sentences designed for 'animacy', but there will also be a brief description of the results for 'position'. Due to the reasons described earlier, only the results from the four most important dialects (Central Catalan, North-Western Catalan, Majorcan and Valencian) will be shown, as well as the overall results and comparison of these four regions.

Before discussing the results themselves, a few details about the methods used in the analysis of the data should be noted. The main part of the analysis was carried out using the programs Excel and R (R Core Team 2019), because of the possibilities they offer for the calculation of mean values for each of the conditions and for the comparison of these based on different parameters. The results presented in the following are, as a rule, based on all the data of one region and the perceived effects therein. Furthermore, in addition to the descriptive analysis, a further analytical method was used, this as a first approach to a statistical analysis of the collected data. The model chosen was a repeated measure ANOVA (Analysis of Variance),14 which made it possible to ascertain whether or not the possible effects detected by the descriptive approach could be confirmed as statistically significant. When such effects could be confirmed to be statistically significant, then we can say that there was a very high probability that they had an impact on the acceptability of the different types of sentences tested in the experiment. Taking into account two of the main sources for possible bias, two sets of ANOVAs were performed for every region – one focusing on the participants (Subject-Analysis) and one for the test sentences (Item-Analysis). For a first statistical analysis of the collected data, ANOVA was deemed an appropriate choice, allowing for a general impression of the data's statistical value. In future work, alternative models could be consulted as a means of achieving an even bigger picture.

**14** The ANOVAs were conducted in R, using the *ez* package (Lawrence 2016).

A final aspect to note is that for the overall results, when combining data from the four main regions, each mean value was calculated based on the 1,200 judgments that the respective condition had received (as a result of the total of 240 participants, each evaluating every condition five times).

#### **6.1 Animacy**

In this Section, the results of the four regions will be introduced separately in order to better illustrate the possible effects of the manipulated factors on the perceived acceptability of the test sentences. The factor of regional variance will then be discussed by presenting the overall results concerning the first main aspect, 'animacy', including a comparison of the four major Catalan dialects. Before starting with the dialect with the highest participation (Central Catalan), a reminder of the focus of the first experiment seems useful. Its main manipulated aspect was the degree of animacy of the direct object in combination with the presence or absence of DOM. The sentences presented to the participants in a completely random order were of the following type: *El guàrdia va transportar al/ el meu nét/gat/sac fins a l'estació de ferrocarrils*.

#### **6.1.1 Regional results for 'animacy'**

In the following Graph, the results obtained from the participation of 90 Central Catalan speakers are illustrated, equalling 450 separate evaluations of each condition. All the values depicted in this Graph, and in those that follow, are means of the aggregated z-scores calculated from the acceptability judgments that each condition had received.15 They are shown with a Confidence Interval of 95%, represented by the error bars of each mean value. On the horizontal axis the six conditions are represented, showing the three degrees of animacy (human, animal, inanimate) and split into two blocks according to the presence or absence of the second factor, DOM.

Focusing on the presence/absence of DOM, overall, Central Catalan speakers clearly prefer the sentences without the preposition *a*, since C4–C6 show higher values than C1–C3. Nevertheless, the three less-favoured conditions still seem

**15** The decision to use mean z-scores instead of normal mean judgments is based on the fact that they allow for a fairly accurate comparison of the participants, taking into account the possible individual interpretations of the acceptability scale.

**Graph 1:** Central Catalan: results for 'animacy'.

to be at the least to some extent acceptable, bearing in mind that especially C1 (humans), but also C2 (animals), reach relatively high mean z-scores. Considering the fact that all three pairs of objects (C1 and C4, C2 and C5, C3 and C6) show mean values whose error bars more and more clearly do not overlap, there is a high probability that the presence/absence of DOM has an effect on the acceptability of a given sentence. Although Central Catalan speakers tend towards the versions without DOM, Graph 1 indicates that mainly for human objects (C1 vs. C4) there is a relatively high acceptance of the version with DOM.

Furthermore, it appears that the participants regard the animacy of the direct object as an influential factor for the acceptability of DOM. Looking at the conditions containing DOM (C1–C3), the human object is distinctly favoured over animals, which in turn are preferred over inanimate marked objects. Since once again neither mean values nor error bars overlap, it can be assumed that the direct object's animacy plays an important part when deciding about the acceptability of a sentence.

The two ANOVAs confirmed both of the effects described for Central Catalan. Furthermore, not only are the effects of DOM and 'animacy' manipulation separately statistically significant, but their interaction is as well, implying that they interactively influence the acceptability of any given sentence.16

**16** ANOVA results for Central Catalan:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effects of DOM: *F*(1, 89) = 179.483, *p* < .001 and 'animacy': *F*(2, 178) = 57.317, *p* < .001 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 178) = 36.327, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

For the analysis of the Majorcan data, the evaluations of 72 native speakers were taken into account, resulting in a total of 360 judgments per condition. An important detail here is the fact that one participant pointed out that he would have given higher votes if the sentences had included the proper definite articles of his dialect (*es*, *sa*). Earlier, an explanation was given as to why it was not feasible to incorporate such regional variations. Even so, it is worth noting that Majorcan speakers' acceptance of sentences containing DOM could be even higher than it already is, considering the following Graph.

**Graph 2:** Majorcan: results for 'animacy'.

Again, the factor 'animacy' appears to have a certain amount of influence over the perceived acceptability of the sentences including DOM, since the mean values of C1–C3 clearly differ from each other and their error bars do not overlap at all. Unsurprisingly, the human object was preferred over the animals and inanimate objects. Remarkably, the z-scores for human objects with DOM (C1) and for the same type of object without DOM (C4) are nearly the same (with a difference of 0.001). This might suggest that Majorcan speakers do not have a preference for one or the other, and thus do not care whether or not a human object is marked. They seem to find both versions equally acceptable. Even for the objects representing animals (C2 and C5) the gap between the two values is quite small. Only when looking at the inanimate objects, a strong partiality for the version without DOM (C3 vs. C6) can be seen.

2. Item-Analysis for the effects of DOM: *F*(1, 29) = 267.394, *p* < .001 and 'animacy': *F***(**2, 58) = 29.354, *p* < .001 as well as their interaction: *F***(**2, 58) = 26.432, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

ANOVAs were used to determine whether these possible effects found in the descriptive approach were of any statistical value. The calculations confirmed, both for 'animacy' and for DOM, the very high probability of an effect on the acceptability of a given sentence, showing these, as well as their interaction, to be statistically highly significant.17

Continuing with the data from North-Western Catalan, it should be noted that this was the region with the smallest number of participants (apart from Rossellonese and Alguerese), amounting only to 36, which still renders 180 evaluations per condition. Looking at the mean values depicted in Graph 3, speakers of North-Western Catalan seem to accept DOM with objects denoting humans far more often than when they refer to animals.

**Graph 3:** North-Western Catalan: results for 'animacy'.

The lowest mean value is attributed to the inanimate objects marked by *a*. In addition, it is highly likely that 'animacy' has an effect on the acceptability of DOM for this region because the three values (C1–C3) show plainly visible differences and their error bars do not overlap at all. The three conditions representing absence of DOM (C4–C6) are at a relatively high (and similar) level, indicating that 'animacy'

**17** ANOVA results for Majorcan:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effects of DOM: *F*(1, 71) = 52.534, *p* < .001 and 'animacy': *F***(**2, 142) = 61.369, *p* < .001 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 142) = 52.984, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

2. Item-Analysis for the effects of DOM: *F*(1, 29) = 55.894, *p* < .001 and 'animacy': *F*(2, 58) = 28.429, *p* < .001 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 58) = 26.39, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

does not come into play regarding the acceptance of sentences without DOM. The non-marked object is clearly favoured overall by North-Western Catalan speakers, with the human objects being the only conditions where the values are somewhat close to each other (C1 vs. C4). Furthermore, the error bars of each pair do not overlap, indicating that presence/absence of DOM very probably affects the acceptability of a sentence.

These tendencies are confirmed by both ANOVAs, producing a statistically very significant result for DOM and for 'animacy', as well as their combination.18 Thus, it seems highly probable that both separately and interactively they have an impact on the acceptance of the sentences.

Lastly, for Valencian a total of 42 participants answered the questionnaire, yielding 210 evaluations per condition overall and allowing for a fairly reliable analysis of the data.

**Graph 4:** Valencian: results for 'animacy'.

Valencians seem to distinguish clearly between the individual degrees of animacy when the object is combined with DOM (C1–C3). Considering their z-scores, we note that the human object is deemed quite acceptable, followed

**18** ANOVA results for North-Western Catalan:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effects of DOM: *F*(1, 35) = 41.411, *p* < .001 and 'animacy': *F*(2, 70) = 25.891, *p* < .001 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 70) = 15.365, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

2. Item-Analysis for the effects of DOM: *F*(1, 29) = 106.245, *p* < .001 and 'animacy': *F*(2, 58) = 26.484, *p* < .001 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 58) = 9.229, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

by animals, which are still seen as somewhat acceptable. Then there is a considerable gap before the marked inanimate objects, these being regarded as decidedly less normal. Given that the error bars do not overlap, there appears to be an effect of animacy manipulation on the acceptability of the sentences. As was the case in the other regions, the conditions without DOM (C4–C6) are judged to be quite equally acceptable by Valencian speakers overall.

Similarly to Majorcan, Valencians do not exhibit a clear preference when the direct object involves humans and presence/absence of DOM (C1 vs. C4). The respective z-scores differ only by the smallest of margins (0.001), indicating the participants' indifference. For the other two categories, the values show that Valencians lean towards the versions without DOM (although in case of animals only slightly). For C2 and C5 (animals) as well as C3 and C6 (inanimate things) the error bars do not overlap, indicating a possible effect of DOM manipulation on the acceptance of a given sentence.

For Valencian, the ANOVA calculations gave statistically significant results for both the effect of 'animacy' and DOM, as well as their interaction, thus confirming the high probability of their influence on the acceptability of the test sentences.19

#### **6.1.2 Overall results for 'animacy' and a comparison of the four regions**

Having discussed the results for each region separately, including the possible and probable effects of 'animacy' and DOM on the acceptability of sentences, we turn now to the overall results and a comparison of the four regions.

The comparison of the results of the four regions shows that all of them follow a similar general pattern of acceptance, suggesting no large regional effect on the acceptability of the sentences. Nonetheless, some variation can be found. The participants evidently favour human marked objects (C1) over animals (C2) and over inanimate objects (C3), whereas the conditions without DOM (C4–C6) all appear to have quite similar levels of acceptance. Interestingly, Majorcan and Valencian are the dialects that more freely accept DOM not only with humans but

**19** ANOVA results for Valencian:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effects of DOM: *F*(1, 41) = 40.534, *p* < .001 and 'animacy': *F*(2, 82) = 27.768, *p* < .001 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 82) = 34.642, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

2. Item-Analysis for the effects of DOM: *F*(1, 29) = 91.891, *p* < .001 and 'animacy': *F*(2, 58) = 18.248, *p* < .001 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 58) = 24.895, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

**Graph 5:** Overall comparison of the results for 'animacy'.

also with animals. Overall, Majorcan shows the highest mean values, even for the inanimate objects (C3). This confirms to some extent what can be found in the literature on the subject. According to several authors, in Majorcan even inanimate direct objects with Differential Object Marking can be found.20

Central and North-Western Catalan behave very similarly to one another, not only in their lower acceptance of sentences with DOM, but also in their higher acceptance of those without (C4–C6). Furthermore, both dialects clearly favour the non-marked objects in every category, whereas Majorcan and Valencian display a different behaviour. As noted earlier, and illustrated in Graph 5, these latter two dialects do not seem to mind whether human direct objects are marked or not – they accept both versions equally (C1 and C4 are virtually at the same level).

A curious detail is the fact that all four dialects seem to consider non-marked animals (C5) slightly less acceptable than their human and inanimate counterparts (C4 and C6). This might be due to the animals chosen for the test sentences, although when designing the experiment, the intention was to avoid less common animals. This aspect could be explored further by dividing the animal category into subcategories and thus observing whether there was any correlation between animal type and acceptability level.

**20** Examples of these objects with DOM are found, among others, in Rohlfs (1971, 323): *a ses patates*, *else pelarem/else pelarem*, *a ses patates* and Wheeler/Yates/Dols (1999, 462): *A ses tovalloles, posa les dins es calaix*.

Generally speaking, and as it pertains to the acceptability of DOM, the four Catalan varieties appear to behave more or less as might be expected21 – favouring the most animated objects. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that whereas the literature on Catalan DOM usually emphasizes the importance of ambiguity as a deciding factor in the use of DOM, these results suggest that it actually might not be so important, at least for the human object. None of the sentences tested during the experiment show any ambiguity whatsoever as to which elements hold the function of subject and direct object. Yet participants still judged the sentences with DOM to be highly acceptable – sometimes even as acceptable as the non-marked ones, as in the case of Majorcan and Valencian.

Before moving on to the second part of the experiment, a few details about the overall results for 'animacy' ought to be noted. In Graph 6 the mean z-scores represent the combination of the evaluations from all four regions, which resulted in a total of 240 participants, equalling 1,200 judgments per condition.

**Graph 6:** Overall results for 'animacy'.

Unsurprisingly, the general shape and form of the overall distribution of mean values is similar to the regional ones. The overall results present the same scalar distribution for the marked objects (C1–C3), with human objects being seen as more acceptable than animals and inanimate ones. The error bars do not overlap, which is a strong indication of the possible effect of 'animacy' on perceived acceptability.

**21** From a general theoretical viewpoint, it seems that the higher up on the animacy-scale, the more frequently a direct object is marked (cf. Bossong 1991; Aissen 2003).

Regarding the three pairs (C1 and C4, C2 and C5, C3 and C6) globally, there is also a more or less clear preference for the unmarked object, though for the human object (C1 vs. C4) the predilection is not as pronounced as for the others. Looking at the respective error bars for all pairings, the fact that they do not overlap suggests an effect of DOM on the acceptability of a given sentence. An interesting finding in terms of this global distribution is the fact that C1 and C4 have very similar levels of acceptance, as indicated earlier. This implies that in nominal clauses with human direct objects, DOM is rather well accepted among Catalan speakers on the whole. In fact, they accept it nearly as much as the version that is prescribed by the normative grammar – the one without DOM. Thus, it can be concluded that in this type of sentence, participants did not mind whether or not the object was marked; they seemed to find both options normal.

For the overall analysis, the ANOVAs yielded statistically significant values, and thus confirmed the high probability of an effect of DOM and of 'animacy', as well as their interaction.22 In this global study of the four regions, the ANOVAs were used to test for another effect: regional variance. Although, as seen in Graph 5 under the descriptive approach, some slight regional differences can be perceived, the statistical analysis does not show a significant value for this effect in both Subject- and Item-Analysis.23 This implies, with very high probability, that the factor 'region' did not have a huge impact on the evaluations and hence that the acceptability of DOM in this type of sentence is not subject to many diatopic factors.

As discussed earlier, the figures shown here only include the results for the four most prevalent Catalan dialects and thus exclude Rossellonese and Alguerese. Considering their geographic situation, it is possible that with further data from these two regions there could be a higher diatopic impact on the acceptability of DOM. But at the moment this remains no more than speculation, and would have to be investigated with the help of more participants.

**22** ANOVA results for overall analysis:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effects of DOM: *F*(1, 236) = 253.784, *p* < .001 and 'animacy': *F*(2, 472) = 149.916, *p* < .001 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 472) = 127.685, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

2. Item-Analysis for the effects of DOM: *F*(1, 29) = 246.266, *p* < .001 and 'animacy': *F*(2, 58) = 49.692, *p* < .001 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 58) = 47.062, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

**23** ANOVA results for the overall analysis:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effect of 'region': *F*(3, 236) = 6.025, *p* < .001 and its interaction with DOM and 'animacy': *F*(6, 472) = 1.693, *p* = 0.121 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

2. Item-Analysis for the effect of 'region': *F*(3, 87) = 1.816, *p* = 0.150 and its interaction with DOM and 'animacy': *F*(6, 174) = 1.125, *p* = 0.349 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

### **6.2 Position**

As noted above, the second experiment part focused on 'position', and participants were presented with sentences of the following structure: *A tu et van vèncer*/*Et van vèncer a tu*/*Et van vèncer en la final del torneig d'escacs*. Here, the main manipulated factors were the position of the direct object given as a personal pronoun, and its corresponding clitic doubling combined with a change between 2nd and 3rd person singular pronouns.

#### **6.2.1 Regional results for 'position'**

The graphs for these results are very similar in layout to those in the previous Section; the only difference lies in the horizontal axis, on which the corresponding conditions (C11–C16) were plotted with their respective combination of the manipulated characteristics.24 First, in Graph 7 the results for Central Catalan are presented, where participants did not seem to show any concern for the change in personal pronouns. When comparing the respective pairs of conditions (C11 vs. C14, C12 vs. C15 and C13 vs. C16) very little difference can be seen in the levels of their mean z-scores, implying that the change between 2nd and 3rd person singular does not have any effect on the acceptability of a sentence.

**Graph 7:** Central Catalan: Results for 'position'.

**24** Abbreviations on the horizontal axis: topicalization (top), dislocation to the right (disr), clitic doubling (cd), absence of any type of dislocation and thus also clitic doubling (ø). The boxes show the split between 2nd and 3rd person singular pronouns.

On the other hand, when looking at the position of the direct object and the corresponding clitic doubling, there appears to be a certain effect on acceptability, since the values are clearly separated and their error bars do not overlap (comparing C11, C12, C13 and C14, C15, C16). Central Catalan speakers overwhelmingly prefer the sentences without any type of dislocation (C13 and C16). This in itself is not very surprising, considering that C13 and C16 represent the most baseline kind of sentence tested in this part of the experiment, consisting of short sentences without any type of modification. Of the two dislocations, Central Catalan speakers lean towards the sentences with topicalization, although they apparently accept both versions containing DOM to a somewhat limited degree.

The conducted ANOVAs indicate, as expected, that the change in the personal pronoun did not have an effect on the acceptability of the test sentences (as reflected by its non-significant result). However, the statistically significant results confirm the probability of an effect of the factor 'position'.25

Continuing with the Majorcan data, the following Graph again plainly highlights that overall participants favoured the most basic type of test sentence

**Graph 8:** Majorcan: Results for 'position'.

**25** ANOVA results for Central Catalan:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effects of 'position': *F*(2, 178) = 191.386, *p* < .001 and 'ppron': *F*(1, 89) = 2.483, *p* = .119 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 178) = 0.487, *p* = .615 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

2. Item-Analysis for the effects of 'position': *F*(2, 58) = 201.39, *p* < .001 and 'ppron': *F*(1, 29) = 0.474, *p* = .497 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 58) = 0.316, *p* = .73 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

without any manipulation. Nevertheless, the other two possible sentence structures show relatively high z-scores as well.

The change in personal pronoun does not seem to affect acceptability, given that the respective pairs of mean values are on very similar levels and their error bars overlap. Regarding the different types of position of the direct object, it is possible that there is a certain effect. Comparing only the two dislocations (both with DOM), Majorcan speakers show a slight preference for topicalization (C11 and C14) while they do not reject C12 and C15 as much as the Central Catalan speakers. This would confirm, at least partly, what was found in Escandell Vidal (2009) about DOM in Majorcan, although she points out that in this dialect dislocation to the right is even more accepted than it appears to be the case for the current study. This is very likely due to the fact that in the experiment presented here, the sentences contained only partial movements to the right and not prototypical dislocations to the extreme right of the sentence, due to the need for strict uniformity of sentence structures.26

By conducting ANOVAs, the possible effect of 'position' can be confirmed, given that a statistically significant result was found. Meanwhile, the change in personal pronoun and the interaction of the two factors did not seem to have an effect on the acceptability of the test sentences.27

Similarly, to the Majorcan and Central Catalan data, the speakers of North-Western Catalan prefer C13 and C16 without any manipulations, but the difference to the other two sentence variations is not as great as it was for the Central region. The average values, however, are sufficiently separate to assume the existence of an effect of the direct object's position on the acceptability of the sentences (comparing C11, C12, C13 and C14, C15, C16). Both types of dislocation (with clitic doubling and DOM) seem to be deemed quite acceptable by the North-Western Catalan speakers, with a slight preference towards topicalization. As was the case for the first two dialects, the changed personal pronouns evidently appear to have no effect on the judgments of the participants.

**26** A further experiment, including sentences with dislocations to the extreme right, would show more clearly to what degree Majorcans accept this type of dislocation.

**27** ANOVA results for Majorcan:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effects of 'position': *F*(2, 142) = 68.357, *p* < .001 and 'ppron': *F*(1, 71) = 0.986, *p* = .324 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 142) = 0.029, *p* = .971 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

2. Item-Analysis for the effects of 'position': *F*(2, 58) = 117.522, *p* < .001 and 'ppron': *F*(1, 29) = 0.766, *p* = .389 as well as their interaction: *F***(**2, 58) = 0.034, *p* = .966 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

**Graph 9:** North-Western Catalan: Results for 'position'.

This is confirmed by the non-significant result that the ANOVAs yield for this factor. For the aspect 'position', then, the model confirms the very high probability of an effect on the acceptability of the sentences.28

Valencian speakers, apparently, judged all conditions to be more or less acceptable, as can be seen in the following Graph. Again, the participants did not seem to pay attention to the change in personal pronoun, since the three respective pairs of mean values are at very similar levels.

On the other hand, 'position' did appear to have a certain influence on the acceptability of the sentences, given that in neither group the values, or their error bars, overlap. Finally, it seems that Valencian speakers accepted both types of dislocation (with clitic doubling and DOM) quite readily, although with a tendency towards topicalization. As was the case with the other regions, participants favoured C13 and C16, which is unsurprising bearing in mind that they represent short sentences without any manipulation.

**28** ANOVA results for North-Western Catalan:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effects of 'position': *F*(2, 70) = 40.835, *p* < .001 and 'ppron': *F*(1, 35) = 0.63, *p* = .433 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 70) = 0.513, *p* = .601 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

2. Item-Analysis for the effects of 'position': *F*(2, 58) = 69.143, *p* < .001 and 'ppron': *F*(1, 29) = 0.544, *p* = .467 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 58) = 0.662, *p* = .52 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

**Graph 10:** Valencian: Results for 'position'.

Furthermore, both ANOVAs once again only confirmed the effect of the change in position on the acceptability of the test sentences.29

#### **6.2.2 Overall results for 'position' and a comparison of the four regions**

Having discussed the regional results concerning the factor 'position' separately, we will now take a look at the four dialects together. One of the most obviously notable things here is the fact that these distributions are not quite as uniform and continuous as those in the comparison graph for the 'animacy' results (Section 6.1.2, Graph 5), which suggests a possible regional effect.

As we have already seen in the regional analysis, the change in personal pronoun (between 2nd and 3rd person singular) did not seem to have any effect on the acceptability of the sentences, considering that the respective z-scores are all at very similar levels (this is even better illustrated in Graph 12, containing the global results).

**29** ANOVA results for Valencian:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effects of 'position': *F*(2, 82) = 44.876, *p* < .001 and 'ppron': *F*(1, 41) = 1.67, *p* = .203 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 82) = 0.076, *p* = .926 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

2. Item-Analysis for the effects of 'position': *F*(2, 58) = 77.204, *p* < .001 and 'ppron': *F*(1, 29) = 0.473, *p* = .497 as well as their interaction: *F*(2, 58) = 0.125, *p* = .883 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

**Graph 11:** Overall comparison of the results for 'position'.

On the other hand, an interesting finding here is that all four major Catalan dialects concur as to which sentences they prefer the most: C13 and C16, both without either form of dislocation and both only differing in the form of the personal pronoun. The mean values for C16 are almost identical, whereas for C13 they are also very close. This predilection for the most basic sentence is, of course, not unexpected, although it still seems quite intriguing that the results of all four regions are so similar.

Concerning the other sentence variations (all conditions with DOM), there is slightly more regional variation. Graph 11 illustrates that Valencians, compared to the other speakers, tended to give the test sentences higher evaluations, whereas the Central Catalan participants, overall, rated them the lowest. However, the exceptions here are C13 and C16. Interestingly, for these two conditions the averages of Central Catalan surpass those of the other regions, whereas for every other condition they are clearly lower than the rest. In other words, the difference between the two conditions with low average values (C11 and C12) and C13 is far greater for Central Catalan than for the other regions. This is also true for the comparison of C16 to C14 and C15. Of all the regions, participants from Central Catalan appear to be the firmest in their preference for the sentences that are free of any type of dislocation of the direct object.

As for the conditions with topicalization (C11 and C14) and dislocation to the right (C12 and C15), Graph 11 illustrates that the distribution of Valencian and Central Catalan is more or less parallel, while Majorcan and North-Western Catalan present more variation. As can be seen, for C11 (topicalization) the North-Western z-scores are somewhat higher than those for Majorcan, whereas Majorcan presents slightly higher values for C15 (dislocation to the right). For C12

and C14, both dialects have very similar mean scores. A final point to raise here is the fact that of the two possibilities with dislocations (and DOM), all the regions clearly lean towards the sentences including topicalization. Again, there is a high probability that this is due in part to the fact that the dislocations to the right were not total, but only partial ones. Interestingly, these partial dislocations still attain a certain degree of acceptance, bearing in mind that they are not the prototypical dislocations to the right, for which there are numerous examples, as indicated in Rohlfs (1971) and Escandell Vidal (2009), among others.

Following the comparison of the four regions, Graph 12 below depicts the overall mean values for the combination of the total of 240 participants throughout the four regions (equalling 1,200 judgments per condition). The Graph illustrates perfectly that the change in personal pronoun did not appear to have any effect on the acceptability of the individual conditions, given that the corresponding averages are virtually the same (C11 vs. C14, C12 vs. C15, C13 vs. C16). This, not surprisingly, is confirmed by the ANOVAs, which did not show a statistically significant value for the change in personal pronoun.30

**Graph 12:** Overall results for 'position'.

**30** ANOVA results for overall analysis:

1. Subject-Analysis for the effects of 'position': *F*(2, 472) = 268.8, *p* < .001, 'ppron': *F*(1, 236) = 1.633, *p* = .203 and 'region': *F*(3, 236) = 6.025, *p* < .001 as well as the interaction between 'region' and 'position': *F*(6, 472) = 4.718, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

2. Item-Analysis for the effects of 'position': *F*(2, 58) = 239.729, *p* < .001 and 'ppron': *F*(1, 29) = 0.367, *p* = .55 and 'region': *F*(3, 87) = 20.872, *p* < .001 as well as the interaction between 'region' and 'position': *F*(6, 174) = 7.343, *p* < .001 on the acceptability of the test sentences.

On the other hand, looking at the position of the direct object, there does seem to be an effect. Within both groups (C11, C12, C13 and C14, C15, C16) the averages differ clearly and their error bars do not overlap. Hence, it is possible that the position of the direct object may have a certain influence on the acceptability of a given sentence. The sentences, it appears, were more acceptable when they contained a topicalization of the direct object than when there was a dislocation to the right. However, as can be seen in Graph 12, in overall terms, participants preferred the most basic version without dislocation.

These findings derived from the descriptive approach are confirmed by the statistical analysis by means of the two ANOVAs. The resulting values for the factor 'position' are statistically highly significant, suggesting that there is indeed such an effect on the evaluation of the sentences. The final aspect explored through the ANOVAs was the possible effect of the factor 'region' on the acceptability of the sentences. As implied in Graph 11 by the visible differences in the four distributions of the mean values, the statistically significant results of both ANOVAs confirm that the factor 'region' is highly likely to have an impact on the acceptability of a given sentence. Furthermore, the combination of 'region' and 'position' is confirmed to have had some influence on the perceptions of the various conditions presented to the participants.

### **7 Conclusions**

The aim of this article has been to illustrate that Catalan in general, and its dialects in particular, are an independent part of the puzzle constituted by the individual types of DOM found in languages across the world. After a long period of being dismissed as a mere Spanish imposition, DOM is now beginning to be seen as an inherent part of the Catalan language itself. Nonetheless, there still are certain discrepancies between the uses permitted by Catalan normative grammars and the current situation found in Catalan dialects, as the experiment described in this article was able to highlight. Based on the results discussed in the previous Sections, it can be said that all Catalan dialects, to a greater or lesser extent, accept DOM in more contexts than the standard language commonly permits.

Furthermore, the factor 'animacy' appears to have quite a substantial impact on the acceptability of DOM with noun phrases, both for Catalan in general as well as for each of the dialects. In each case there was a pronounced scalar distinction in the perceived acceptability of the direct objects' three animacy levels, with the human object reaching a considerably high level throughout the regions. In addition, in this type of sentence, and contrary to what standard Catalan dictates, it appears that the total lack of ambiguity does not impede speakers' acceptance of DOM in the least. The only major regional variation in this part of the experiment was found for the human objects. Both Valencian and Majorcan seem to perceive the use of DOM with human direct objects in noun phrases as facultative, accepting its presence and absence at equally high levels. Central and North-Western Catalan, by contrast, generally prefer the non-marked version.

Concerning the second factor, 'position', on the whole the position of the direct object had an effect on the acceptability of the sentences, with all the dialects tending towards the most basic sentences as the most acceptable ones and topicalization as the more acceptable version containing DOM. Interestingly, in this part of the experiment, the regional differences were more pronounced than in the first part.

In conclusion, both main factors analyzed in this experiment, 'animacy' and 'position', appear to have an effect on the acceptability of DOM in the Catalan varieties, both on a general as well as on a regional level. Moreover, from a statistical point of view, the ANOVAs confirm the existence of both effects, as well as an interaction effect between DOM and 'animacy'. The third main factor, regional variance, was only found to be of statistical significance for 'position', thus indicating that in some contexts diatopic factors have an impact on the acceptability of DOM in Catalan, whereas in others they do not.

As mentioned in the opening sections of this paper, some of the literature suggests that Catalan and Spanish DOM share several characteristics. The results of the present experiment seem to indicate that this is true to a certain degree, especially for the three marked objects in the analysis of 'animacy', which show a similar distribution to Spanish.31 However, the results also reaffirm the inherently independent evolution of Catalan DOM, considering that the three unmarked objects in the 'animacy' section behave in a wholly dissimilar way to Modern Spanish DOM (cf. Wall 2015). In this study the results suggested that in Modern Spanish, unmarked human objects in particular are considered not at all acceptable; and this, in turn, underlines the individuality of the Modern Catalan DOM configuration.

There are several ways in which the current research might be extended and complemented. Based on the existing data, the possible influence of some of the demographic aspects described could be explored, although for statistically rel-

**31** That is not to say that the Catalan configuration is solely due to Spanish influence, although geographic proximity suggests at least some interaction between the two languages (as can be expected in any situation of adjacent languages). Rather, it seems that the evolution of Catalan, for this type of marked objects, is slowly going in the same direction as that of Spanish, reflecting a perfectly normal evolution of a DOM system.

evant conclusions a larger dataset from each region would be required. Indeed, in terms of collecting more data, further material on Rossellonese and Alguerese would help to complete the whole picture of DOM in the Catalan dialects. This would be especially interesting, taking into account that in these regions it might be possible to observe influences from other Romance languages which do not show DOM, or which do so only on a more limited scale. As noted earlier on, further subcategories of the animacy of direct objects, such as multiple animal categories or further inanimate categories, could also be investigated, as well as other categories for the second part of the experiment, including total dislocations to the right. In conclusion, it is safe to say that there is still far more to explore towards gaining a complete picture of DOM in Catalan, both in general and in all its different dialects.

# **Bibliography**

# Diego Romero Heredero **Telicity and Differential Object Marking in the history of Spanish**

**Abstract:** This paper explores the influence of telicity on Differential Object Marking (DOM) from a diachronic perspective. Previous research has frequently pointed to telicity as one of the verbal factors that trigger DOM in Spanish. However, this assumption has not been tested empirically. The present study provides a corpus analysis examining the question of whether the assumed impact of telicity on DOM in Modern Spanish, which has been observed in synchronic studies, also holds for earlier stages of Spanish. The corpus-based study covers the 14th, 16th and 20th centuries, and is the first empirical study that addresses the relationship between telicity and DOM with human direct objects. The results challenge previous analyses, suggesting that telicity has no significant impact on DOM in the periods surveyed. These findings lead us to conclude that telicity alone does not trigger DOM, which raises the question of whether it is possible that the effect of telicity observed in previous studies could be the consequence of the interaction of telicity with other verbal factors such as affectedness or agentivity.

**Keywords:** aspectual class, corpus analysis, definiteness, Differential Object Mark ing (DOM), language change, lexical aspect, telicity, verbal factors

**Acknowledgements:** This paper was presented at the Workshop "Differential Object Marking in Spanish – diachronic change and synchronic variation" (University of Zurich, Zurich, June 4th‒5th, 2018). I would like to thank the organizers of the workshop, Larissa Binder, Johannes Kabatek, Philipp Obrist and Albert Wall, for the great space for discussion they gave me, and the audience of the workshop for their comments. I would also like to thank Javier Caro Reina, Marco García García, Klaus von Heusinger and Manuel Leonetti for their comments and invaluable support, without which this article would certainly not have been possible. The research for this paper has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG – German Research Foundation) SFB 1252 (Project-ID 281511265) *Prominence in language* within the project B04, *Interaction of nominal and verbal features for Differential Object Marking*, at the University of Cologne.

**Diego Romero Heredero** University of Cologne, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
# **1 Introduction**

Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a grammatical phenomenon conditioned by the interaction of various factors (cf. García García 2018 for an overview). These factors are not only related to the noun phrase (NP) having the function of direct object, but also to other aspects of the context in which it appears. In the early 1950s, Fernández Ramírez had already pointed out with regard to Spanish that "the nature of the verb and the nature of the noun or pronoun that functions as a direct object influence this phenomenon" (1951, 151). In this regard, Laca (2006) distinguishes between local and global factors. Local factors are those concerned with the properties of the NP that occupies the object position, while global factors are those concerned with the context in which it appears (Laca 2006, 430–431). More precisely, the animacy of the direct object, its degree of referentiality and the specificity of the referent are considered local factors (Company Company 2002; Leonetti 2004; Laca 2006). On the other hand, global factors are those related to the semantics of the verb, such as telicity, affectedness and agentivity (Torrego 1998; 1999; von Heusinger 2008; 2011; García García 2014; Romero Heredero in press); the presence of secondary predication referring to the object (Laca 2006); the topicality of the object and clitic doubling (Melis 1995; Torrego 1998; Laca 2006; Ormazábal/Romero 2013).

The influence of local factors has been widely documented in Spanish, not only from a synchronic point of view, but also from a diachronic perspective (Company Company 2002; Laca 2006; von Heusinger 2008). In contrast, global factors, and more specifically those related to the lexical properties of the verb, have not received as much attention. Nevertheless, while some studies deal with affectedness and agentivity, establishing the extent to which these factors influence DOM (Pottier 1968; von Heusinger 2008; 2011; García García 2018), telicity continues unattended, with the exception of the work of Torrego (1998; 1999), which will be presented in Section 2.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the factor of telicity drawing on diachronic data. It will be discussed whether telicity has been a trigger for DOM in earlier stages of Spanish, as assumed for Modern Spanish, and whether the diachronic evolution of DOM supports the claims about the effect of telicity at present. Thus, the impact of telicity on DOM with human direct objects is addressed for the first time from a diachronic perspective and with an empirical methodology.1

The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 deals with the relationship between lexical aspect and case marking, which has been studied in many lan-

**1** For a more detailed version of the analysis that also includes affectedness and the interaction between telicity and affectedness, cf. Romero Heredero (in press)*.*

guages and, more specifically, addresses the effect of telicity on DOM which has been suggested for Spanish by previous studies; Section 3 presents the diachronic corpus study conducted for the 14th, 16th and 20th centuries; finally, Section 4 summarizes all the findings derived from the corpus study and the most important ideas raised in the discussion about the influence of telicity on DOM.

# **2 Telicity, case-marking and DOM**

Telicity is a property of the verbal phrase (VP) implying the existence of an end point, after which the event designated by the predicate terminates or does not continue to take place (Verkuyl 1972; Dowty 1979; Tenny 1994; Krifka 1998). Hopper and Thomson (1980, 252) point to telicity as one of the factors linked to a high degree of transitivity in the clause, arguing that an action described by a telic VP is more effectively transferred to the object than one lacking an endpoint.

The relationship between case-marking and telicity or, more broadly, between case-marking and aspect, is a phenomenon that is well documented in many languages (Richardson 2012, 965). This relationship has been suggested for Slavic languages (Russian, Borer 2005, among others; Belarusian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Richardson 2007), Germanic languages (German, Leiss 2000, among others; Icelandic, Svenonius 2002), and even more prominently, for Finno-Ugric languages (Finnish, Kiparsky 1998, among others; Estonian, Tamm 2007, among others; Hungarian, Csirmaz 2006). Although, to a lesser extent, the case-aspect relationship has also been defended for other languages such as Scottish Gaelic (Ramchand 1997), Hindi (Mohanan 1984) or Spanish (Torrego 1998; 1999), among others.

One of the most frequently cited languages that exhibits this case-aspect relationship is Finnish, which presents an accusative-versus-partitive opposition for the internal argument which seems to be linked to an aspectual contrast (Richardson 2012, 965). The nature of that opposition has been described in terms of boundedness, telicity, and sometimes both. Kiparsky's examples in (1) exemplify this relationship. In Finnish the accusative has been characterized in terms of resultativity, as illustrated in (1) by the verb *to shoot*. This verb can assign different cases, giving rise to different aspectual interpretations. While in (1a) the verb has a partitive object and denotes an activity ('to shoot at'), in (1b) the verb is followed by an accusative object and describes an accomplishment ('to shoot dead') (Kiparsky 1998, 266–267). This example shows that accusative case in Finnish is associated with a telic character of the event, while partitive case is related to an atelic reading.

	- a. *Ammu-i-n karhu-a* shoot-pst-1sg bear-part 'I shot at the/a bear.'
	- b. *Ammu-i-n karhu-n* shoot-pst-1sg bear-acc 'I shot the/a bear.'

(Kiparsky 1998, 266–267)

With regard to Spanish, Torrego (1998; 1999) are the only studies devoted to the interaction between DOM and lexical aspect. Torrego (1999) describes the relationship between DOM and telicity2 according to the assumptions in (2).

	- a. Telic verbs impose DOM on their direct object.
	- b. DOM triggers a telic interpretation on atelic verbs.

(Torrego 1999, 1787–1790)

The first assumption (2a) refers to the requirement of DOM by telic verbs. Following Torrego, telic verbs, which comprise achievements (e.g. *encontrar* 'to find') and accomplishments (e.g. *construir* 'to build'), describe delimited situations, and this delimitation confers them a specific character. The direct object of telic verbs moves to a certain syntactic position which implies the interpretation of the NP as the boundary of the event and, therefore, as specific. In that position the object receives a certain type of case that implies *a-*marking in Spanish. Therefore, telic verbs require DOM due to the specific character of the situations they describe and, for this reason, intrinsically telic verbs, such as *insultar* 'to insult', obligatorily require their direct object to be marked with DOM, as can be observed in (3), where the sentence without *a*-marking would be ungrammatical.

(3) DOM with telic verbs *Marta insultó \*(a) un compañero*. 'Marta insulted a colleague.'

(Torrego 1999, 1787)

The second assumption (2b) is aimed at the interpretation of atelic verbs. In contrast to telic verbs, these verbs do not require DOM. However, their interpreta-

**2** Torrego refers to the inherent telicity of certain aspectual classes of verbs, not to telicity as a property of the VP.

tion changes if the direct object is differentially *a*-marked. Following Torrego, *a-*marking forces a reading of the object as specific and this implies a telic reading of the event. The example in (4a) shows that activity verbs, such as *besar* 'to kiss', do not require DOM. Nevertheless, the reading is telic when the direct object is *a*-marked, as can be observed in (4b), where the verb admits a temporal prepositional phrase (PP) introduced by the preposition *en* 'in' (telicity test). This reading is not obtained in (4c), where the temporal PP is rejected.

(4) DOM with atelic verbs a. *Besaron (a) un niño.* b. *Besaron a un niño en un segundo.* c. \**Besaron un niño en un segundo.* 'They kissed a boy (in a second).'

(Torrego 1999, 1788–1789)

The two assumptions presented above represent the only systematic attempt so far to describe the impact of telicity on DOM in Spanish. However, they are based on a rather small number of examples and subsequent studies have suggested that speakers' intuitions do not always support them (Delbecque 2002, 90; Fábregas 2013, 25). Furthermore, it should be noted that these assumptions have not been empirically tested. Moreover, they only address the issue from a synchronic perspective.

The following section provides a diachronic corpus analysis investigating the impact of telicity on DOM from 14th to 20th-century European Spanish.

# **3 Diachronic corpus analysis**

In order to study the effect of telicity on DOM in the 14th, 16th and 20th centuries, I conducted a corpus analysis based on the *Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española* (CDH). Section 3.1 presents the hypotheses according to the assumptions of the previous studies described in Section 2. Section 3.2 is dedicated to the design of the study. Section 3.3 contains the results according to definiteness, telicity and aspectual class of the verbs. Finally, Section 3.4 discusses the results.

### **3.1 Hypothesis**

As mentioned in Section 1, some diachronic studies on factors such as referentiality or affectedness have shown that their impact on DOM was already present in previous stages of Spanish. However, telicity has been studied only from a synchronic perspective so far. This leads to the question of whether this factor also had any impact on previous stages of Spanish. To address this question, I have conducted a corpus study encompassing the 14th, 16th and 20th centuries with the hypothesis reported in (5).

(5) Hypothesis for DOM and telicity The occurrence of DOM is more frequent with human direct objects of telic predicates than with human direct objects of atelic predicates.

This hypothesis is based on the notion of telicity as a property of the VP, as introduced in Section 2. This remark is relevant since previous studies that have addressed the relationship between telicity and DOM have generally based their hypotheses on a more restricted concept of telicity that refers only to the semantics of the verb (inherent telicity). The problem with this approach arises when categorizing certain verbs according to their inherent telicity in terms of Vendler (1957) (cf. Marín 1999 for discussion). In (6) the verb *to run* can be considered either atelic (activity verb) or telic (accomplishment verb) depending on the argument structure it exhibits.

	- a. *Mary runs.* (one argument; activity)
	- b. *Mary runs a mile.* (two arguments; accomplishment)

Considering this problem, it seems safer to take the definition of telicity as a property of the VP, and to classify all the VPs according to their behaviour in the test that has traditionally been used to distinguish telic from atelic predicates. As can be seen in (7), those VPs that admit a PP headed by the preposition *in* with a delimiting function will be considered telic, while those that do not admit it will be classified as atelic.

	- a. \**Mary runs in an hour.*
	- b. *Mary runs a mile in an hour.*

#### **3.2 Study design**

The analysis is based on the *Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española* (CDH). It comprises the entries corresponding to the *CDH nuclear* as well as a selection of texts from both the *Corpus diacrónico del español* (CORDE) and the *Corpus de referencia del español actual* (CREA). The CDH allows for the search of single words (or a combination of words) according to word class, author, work, time span, text type, country and text subject. Unfortunately, this corpus is only partially annotated and, although it allows searching by word type, it is not possible to search for specific syntactic patterns such as DOM.

The search is restricted to European Spanish of the 14th, 16th and 20th centuries. The sources for European Spanish are extensive enough for a diachronic study since they contain a total of 7,745,250 words for the 14th century, 49,797,748 words for the 16th century and 113,509,174 words for the 20th century. The time span selection is motivated by Octavio de Toledo's (2016, 61–64) observation that the 18th and 19th centuries are less represented than the rest of the periods in the CORDE and, consequently, in the CDH. Moreover, the same author argues that these centuries constitute a period of great linguistic variation contrary to what had been previously defended (cf. Kabatek 2016 for discussion). With this in mind, it has been decided to avoid them and to select three periods whose representation in the corpus is wider and which present more internal stability.

The study is based on 3,200 instances following a 2x2x3 factorial design that takes into account telicity, definiteness and century as independent variables, and the presence/absence of DOM as dependent variable. The distribution of instances according to the independent variables has been structured as follows (cf. Table 1): as far as telicity is concerned, half of the instances contain a telic VP and the other half show an atelic VP. With regard to definiteness, 75% of the cases have a definite direct object NP and the remaining 25% contain an indefinite direct object NP. Finally, regarding the temporal distribution, the 14th century represents 20% of instances; the 16th century 30%; and the 20th century 50%. This configuration allows an easy comparison between the results obtained for telic and atelic VPs, being this the main goal of the study, since both categories are equally represented. As regards the distribution of cases according to definiteness and century, the configuration reflects the availability of instances found in the corpus for the different categories.

All instances extracted from the corpus to complete the distribution described above contain a full definite or indefinite human direct object NP in postverbal position (SVO). Thus, collective nouns, animate non-human NPs, inanimate NPs, proper names, bare nouns and left dislocations are excluded.

**Table 1:** Distribution of instances extracted from the CDH according to century, telicity and definiteness.

The collection of the 3,200 examples is based on the selection of ten inherently telic verbs and ten atelic verbs, following Vendler's classification. This selection has not implied the assignment of the instances of each verb to a certain category, but it has been just the starting point, since the telicity of each case has been evaluated individually using the test described in Section 3.1. Then, the search for instances has been carried out, starting from those verbs, until achieving the pre-established quantity of instances for each category.3 When the first ten verbs have not been enough to reach this goal, other verbs that meet the necessary conditions have been added (cf. Appendix for a complete list of the verbs used for the analysis). Possible changes in meaning or argument structure of the verbs over time have been taken into account using the *Diccionario del castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón* (DiCCA-XV). Further, it has been checked that the contribution of examples of each verb amounts to a maximum of 10%, thus ensuring that each category is comprised of at least 10 verbs. This measure avoids a situation where the result corresponding to each category reflects the behaviour of single verbs that have higher representation in the corpus.

Having obtained all the examples, they have been described individually according to the presence or absence of DOM (dependent variable) and the aspectual class of the verb (inherent telicity). With regard to the latter, it has been annotated according to the most common argument structure of each verb, taking into account the potential problems this may entail (cf. Section 3.1). However, this information may be interesting to check the assumptions of previous studies.

**3** The concept of "category" in this context refers to the different sets of examples that are generated by the factorial design of the search, e.g. definite direct objects in telic VPs from the 16th century.

#### **3.3 Results**

This section describes the results of the corpus-based study according to definiteness, telicity and aspectual class. The results are presented in five different figures which allow us to observe the evolution of the impact on DOM of the different factors.

The first part of this section is devoted to definiteness. Although the hypothesis of this work does not directly refer to this factor, definiteness is essential in order to understand the evolution of DOM in Spanish. In addition, another reason for including the results of definiteness here is to provide an overview of the evolution of DOM which allows us to check whether this data points in the same direction as the results obtained in previous studies. Figure 1 illustrates the occurrence of DOM according to century (14th/16th/20th) and definiteness (definite NP/indefinite NP). With regard to indefinite direct object NPs, the presence of DOM shows a relative frequency of 28% (44/160) in the 14th century, 35% (85/240) in the 16th century and 70% (279/400) in the 20th century. As far as definite direct object NPs are concerned, the occurrence of DOM has a relative frequency of 50% (242/480) in the 14th century, 65% (468/720) in the 16th century and 93% (1120/1200) in the 20th century. Although there has been a general increase in the presence of DOM over time, this data shows that definite human direct object NPs have always favoured the presence of DOM over indefinite human direct object NPs.

**Figure 1:** DOM according to century and definiteness.

Note also that these numbers largely confirm the results obtained in previous diachronic corpus-based studies (Company Company 2002; Laca 2006; von Heusinger/Kaiser 2011).

Figures 2 and 3 present the results for telicity according to definite and indefinite NPs, respectively. In the case of definite NPs, the relative frequency of DOM with regard to telicity is distributed as follows: the occurrence of DOM shows a relative frequency of 54% (129/240) with atelic predicates and 47% (113/240) with telic predicates in the 14th century. In the 16th century, the use of DOM registers a relative frequency of 66% (237/360) for atelic predicates and 64% (231/360) for telic predicates. Finally, the presence of DOM has a relative frequency of 95% (568/600) for atelic predicates and 92% (552/600) for telic predicates in the 20th century. The occurrence of DOM increases over time as shown in the results according to definiteness. However, Figure 2 does not show any significant effect of telicity on DOM with definite direct objects in any of the three periods.

**Figure 2:** DOM with definite NPs according to century and telicity.

Examples of the lack of DOM from 20th-century Spanish with definite human direct objects are given in (8), where both a direct object of an atelic VP, such as *recordar la hortelana* 'to remember the gardener', and a direct object of a telic VP, such as *abatir sus caciques* 'to overthrow their chiefs' are not differentially marked.

	- a. *¿Recuerda usted la pobre hortelana enferma que vimos en la ermita aquella tarde?* (atelic predicate) 'Do you remember the poor sick gardener we saw at the hermitage that afternoon?'

(20th century, Blasco Ibáñez, *Entre naranjos*) b. *La civilización que […] abatió sus caciques.* (telic predicate) 'The civilization that […] overthrew their chiefs.' (20th century, Lopetegui/Zubillaga, *Historia de la Iglesia en la América española desde el descubrimiento hasta el siglo XIX*)

Turning to indefinite NPs, i.e. to Figure 3, the relative frequency of DOM is distributed as follows: the occurrence of DOM has a relative frequency of 35% (28/80) with atelic predicates and 20% (16/80) with telic predicates in the 14th century. In the 16th century, the use of DOM registers a relative frequency of 41% (49/120) for atelic predicates and 30% (36/120) for telic predicates. Finally, the presence of DOM shows a relative frequency of 69% (137/200) for atelic predicates and 71% (142/200) for telic predicates in the 20th century. As was observed in the case of definite direct objects, we can see the increase in the relative frequency of DOM with indefinite direct objects over time. Furthermore, in the case of indefinite NPs, the 14th and 16th centuries show a slight tendency to favour the occurrence of DOM in atelic VPs, however the effect is not significant. Consequently, the assumed hypothesis of the influence of telicity on DOM could not be confirmed.

**Figure 3:** DOM with indefinite NPs according to century and telicity.

Examples of the presence of DOM from 14th-century Spanish with indefinite human direct objects are given in (9), where all examples present *a*-marking in their direct object regardless of whether the predicate is telic or atelic.

	- a. *Juan Núñez amava a un cavallero que desían Gonçalo Gómez.* (atelic predicate)

'Juan Núñez loved a knight who was called Gonçalo Gómez.'

(14th century, Anonymous, *Crónica del muy valeroso rey don Fernando el cuarto*)

b. *En la manyana ella encontro a vn ciudadano antigo.* (telic predicate) 'In the morning she found an old citizen.'

> (14th century, Fernández de Heredia, *Traducción de Vidas paralelas de Plutarco, III*)

Figures 4 and 5 summarize the results for aspectual class according to definite and indefinite NPs, respectively. It is important to remember that the number of instances contained in each category is not balanced in this case since aspectual class is only addressed indirectly in this study. With regard to definite NPs, the relative frequency of DOM is distributed as follows: the occurrence of DOM presents in the 14th century a relative frequency of 61% (43/70) with states, 49% (86/176) with activities, 44% (28/64) with accomplishments and 50% (85/170) with achievements. In the 16th century, the use of DOM exhibits a relative frequency of 64% (63/98) for states, 65% (179/277) for activities, 60% (61/102) for accomplishments and 68% (165/243) for achievements. Lastly, the presence of DOM registers a relative frequency of 90% (150/166) with states, 96% (452/472) with activities, 93% (125/134) with accomplishments and 92% (393/428) with achievements in the 20th century. Although the increase in DOM over time is again visible in Figure 4, the aspectual class shows no significant effect on the occurrence of *a*-marking with definite objects.

Examples of the lack of DOM from 20th-century Spanish with definite human direct objects are given in (10), where both the direct object of an activity verb, such as *guiar* 'to guide', and the direct object of an achievement verb, such as *hallar* 'to find', are not differentially marked.

**Figure 4:** DOM with definite NPs according to century and aspectual class.

	- a. *Y guiaré los ciegos por camino que no sabían.* (activity) 'And I will lead the blind by a way which they did not know.' (20th century, Anonymous, *Biblia Reina-Valera*)
	- b. *entre pescadores halló Cristo sus primeros secuaces.* (achievement) 'Among fishermen, Christ found his first followers.'

(20th century, Pardo Bazán, *San Francisco de Asís. Siglo XIII*)

Turning to indefinite NPs, Figure 5 shows the following distribution: the presence of DOM in the 14th century has a relative frequency of 23% (5/22) for states, 40% (23/58) for activities, 9% (1/11) for accomplishments and 22% (15/69) for of achievements. In the 16th century, DOM registers a relative frequency of 20% (7/35) for states, 50% (43/86) for activities, 33% (12/36) for accomplishments and 28% (23/83) for achievements. Finally, DOM shows a relative frequency of 40% (23/58) for states, 82% (122/149) for activities, 86% (31/36) for accomplishments and 66% (103/157) for achievements in the 20th century. Like in the rest of the figures, an increase of DOM can be observed in relation to the different periods. Moreover, while the variation between aspectual classes is almost imperceptible in Figure 4, in the case of indefinite NPs a higher variation can be noticed. However, the differences between aspectual classes have turned out not to be significant. Thus, the data presented in this paper cannot confirm the relationship between inherently telic verbs and DOM proposed in previous studies.

**Figure 5:** DOM with indefinite NPs according to century and aspectual class.

Examples of the presence of DOM from 14th-century Spanish with indefinite human direct objects are given in (11), where both present *a*-marking in their direct object regardless of aspectual class.

	- a. *non guardauan a otras mugeres sinon a sus madres.* (activity) 'They did not respect other women apart from their mothers.'

(14th century, Don Juan Manuel, *Libro de los estados*)

b. *et clamo a vn cauallero que era aguazil suyo.* (achievement) 'And he called a knight who was his sheriff.'

(14th century, Fernández de Heredia, *Gran crónica de España III*)

### **3.4 Discussion**

The results of the corpus-based study presented in the previous section do not confirm the hypothesis proposed in Section 3.1 repeated herein (12).

(12) Hypothesis for DOM and telicity The presence of DOM is more frequent with human direct objects of telic predicates than with human direct objects of atelic predicates.

The corpus analysis has revealed that telicity had no impact on the presence of DOM in previous centuries. Similarly, aspectual class does not show any clear relationship with the use of *a*-marking. These results question Torrego's (1999, 1787) first assumption (cf. 2a), since the inherent telicity of accomplishments and achievements neither implies DOM in the 20th century, nor triggers its occurrence in previous stages of Spanish.

However, it is interesting to note that with indefinite direct objects a slight variation can be observed which does not exist for definite direct objects. This can be seen in the results concerning both telicity and aspectual class. Although these are not significant differences, it means that telicity or aspectual class might have a slight effect on DOM, perhaps as a consequence of its interaction with other factors, but only on indefinite direct objects. Therefore, if such a slight variation can be explained by the interaction of telicity with some other factor, the effect of telicity is subordinated to definiteness and does not act directly on direct human objects, contrary to what previous studies defended.