Differential Object Marking in Catalan: History, controversies and use

Abstract

This article focuses on the study of the prepositional accusative, that is, the phenomenon of introducing certain direct objects with the preposition a. We frame the phenomenon within the general linguistic context, in the context of Romance languages in particular, and focusing on Catalan we refer to the descriptive and prescriptive visions that have existed. We also show how large-scale diachronic corpus studies provide a very detailed picture of when and to what extent the phenomenon began to emerge in Catalan, and what the role of the foreign influence from Spanish was. Finally, we present a preview of the results of a pioneering dialectal macro-survey carried out with more than 400 native Catalan speakers from all Catalan dialects, which reveals that with the sole exception of the Catalan spoken in Roussillon, the prepositional accusative is a widespread phenomenon across the whole linguistic territory, that is, in Central, North-Western, Valencian, Balearic, and Alguerese Catalan, to varying degrees.