Accusative object marking
A change in progress in Cuban Spanish?
Although accusative object marking has been widely studied in Spanish, there do not appear to be sociolinguistic studies addressing its variation and possible change, despite evidence of loss of the marker from Dominican Spanish. This paper describes the findings of a study on the marking of human accusative objects in Cuban Spanish that compared two time periods and two generational cohorts with spoken data from the 1960s and 1990s. A significantly lower rate of object marking was found for the later time period, as well as similar rates for one generational cohort studied at both times. The findings of a logistic regression analysis suggested that loss of the object marker is a change in progress constrained by definiteness of the object. It is shown that the pattern found here for Cuban Spanish is more similar to Old Spanish than to Modern Spanish.
Keywords: language change, accusative object marking, sociolinguistics, language variation, Spanish, Cuban Spanish
Published online: 08 November 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.8.2.02alf
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.8.2.02alf
Cited by
Cited by 9 other publications
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Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 32:1 ► pp. 185 ff.
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In The Acquisition of Differential Object Marking [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 26],
► pp. 105 ff.
Rodríguez-Ordóñez, Itxaso
2020.
In The Acquisition of Differential Object Marking [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 26],
► pp. 105 ff.
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