An experimental investigation of differential object marking in Mexican Spanish

Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a phenomenon widely attested in Spanish. In two experimental studies using production and acceptability judgments we examined the extent to which Mexican Spanish presents some variation among monolingual speakers with respect to expansion of DOM. We tested whether DOM with animate and specific objects is categorical in this variety, and whether DOM is expanding to inanimate definite and indefinite objects as observed by diachronic studies of Mexican and other Latin American varieties. We also tested DOM with other constructions: bare plurals, the verbs like tener and haber, small clauses and causative and perception verbs. Our study contributes new data documenting linguistic variation in native speakers and confirms synchronic and diachronic analyses of DOM in Spanish.