Differential Object Marking in Spanish: the effect of affectedness

Abstract

Affectedness is a key property of patient arguments that has been shown to be an important factor for argument selection and case marking. In addition, it has been proven to be relevant for differential object marking (DOM). However, there are only few studies that investigate the influence of affectedness on DOM in Spanish. Further, previous studies have been based on corpus analyses that focus on the diachrony of DOM. This paper assumes a notion of affectedness developed within the framework of force dynamics, according to which an affected argument is defined as the recipient of the force that is specified by the verbal content. Following this definition, we present an empirical investigation based on experimental data from a forced-choice questionnaire involving 326 speakers of Modern European Spanish. The study shows that affectedness has a significant influence on the acceptability of DOM. Furthermore, a close inspection of the experimental data reveals the observation that DOM is not only favoured by the affectedness of the direct object, but also by its agentivity.