Differential Object Marking in Cuban Spanish

Abstract

Recent research has shown that Differential Object Marking (DOM) is less frequent in some varieties of Latin American Spanish than in European Spanish. This is the case in Caribbean Spanish, which includes Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Spanish. We will investigate whether these varieties have preserved an older language stage or, rather, whether this is a more recent development resulting from DOM retraction. In this paper, we will focus on DOM in Cuban Spanish. Following on from Alfaraz (2011), who studied DOM on the basis of sociolinguistic interviews, we will examine DOM both from a diachronie and from a synchronic perspective. The diachronie approach is based on a corpus analysis encompassing the 19th and 20th centuries while the synchronic approach is based on grammatically judgment tasks. The corpus analysis points to a slight retraction which evolved with indefinite human nouns. The results of the grammaticality judgment tasks reveal that Cuban Spanish speakers accept the absence of DOM with definite human nouns, which is unacceptable in European Spanish. They also rate the absence of DOM with indefinite human nouns as highly acceptable, as opposed to their European counterparts. We compare the findings provided from the corpus analysis and the judgment task by discussing the importance of considering both production and acceptability data. Thus, this paper makes an important empirical and theoretical contribution to the patterns of DOM in Caribbean Spanish.