Differential object marking and its acquisition in different languages and contexts

This volume brings together a selection of papers that were presented at the international workshop on the acquisition of differential object marking (DOM) organized by Alexandru Mardale (INaLCO, SeDyL) in Paris on December 10, 2016 as part of the Unity and diversity in Differential Object Marking research project funded by the Fédération Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques of the CNRS. Other papers in the volume were comissioned by Silvina Montrul (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) as part of her collaborative research projects on DOM in language acquisition. Taking a crosslinguistic perspective, the present volume includes 13 chapters on the monolingual and bilingual acquisition of DOM in a number of typologically unrelated languages (Basque, Estonian, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish), from different theoretical and acquisition perspectives, and using different methodologies. The new and original empirical data from diverse acquisition situations presented in this collection contribute to advance our understanding of the factors that characterize DOM in diverse languages and to test and evaluate the explanatory power of available theoretical analyses of DOM and of language acquisition.