Comparative study of differential object marking in language contact situations (Catalan-Spanish and Basque-Spanish)

Abstract

This paper offers a comparative description of differential object marking (DOM) – that is, the use of a preposition or a particular marking to introduce direct objects – in Basque, Catalan and Spanish, and focuses on the contact situation between the first two languages (where the phenomenon is excluded from the standard) and the last one (where the phenomenon is fully accepted by prescriptivism). We first present an overview of the sociolinguistic treatment that DOM has received in Catalan and Basque, as in both languages the phenomenon has been traditionally stigmatized from the sociolinguistic point of view and banned by prescriptive grammars. Next, we undertake a characterization of the phenomenon in the three languages under study, taking into account the morphosyntactic manifestations of DOM as well as its triggering factors. This characterization allows us to show that in the language contact situation both between Catalan and Spanish and between Basque and Spanish there are points of convergence as well as divergence in relation to DOM.

Keywords: Catalan, Basque, Spanish, language contact, syntactic variation, microcomparison.