Differential Object Marking in Spanish and Romanian

This book examines Differential Object Marking (DOM) in modern Spanish and Romanian, focusing on language contact and bidirectional crosslinguistic influence in Romanian-Spanish bilinguals. Two main goals guide the study: (i) to provide an in-depth comparison of DOM in the two languages, examining key contexts that incorporate animacy and referentiality with fully parallel empirical data, and (ii) to investigate bidirectional effects of bilingualism on comprehension and production of DOM in Romanian-Spanish bilinguals, including identification of underlying patterns related to (socio)linguistic variables. For these purposes, a complementary approach is used, combining primarily experimental data (oral semi-spontaneous production tasks and acceptability judgements) with sociolinguistic background information and voiced metalinguistic intuitions. This book not only advances general DOM research for Spanish and Romanian, offering new insights for several highly discussed contexts (e.g., specificity in indefinites), but it is also relevant for key issues in bilingualism research, especially on languages that share DOM. Here, crosslinguistic effects are shown to emerge in a much more nuanced fashion than in other language pairs.