A Study of DOM in Asturian (‘Dialectu Vaqueiru’)

The present paper explores Differential Object Marking in a variety of Asturian (Western Iberian Romance) spoken in western Asturias (northwestern Spain). This ancestral form of speech stands out from Central Asturian and especially from Standard Spanish. For a number of reasons, ranging from profound changes in pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and information structure to slight but very relevant effects on syntax. The main goal of this study is to examine the special marking of direct objects in order to find out what triggers the distribution of Differential Object Marking in this variety. To this aim, this paper will examine, from a variationist perspective, the influence of a number of semantic and discourse-pragmatic parameters on the marking of direct objects in this Western Asturian language as well as in Standard Spanish 1 and Central Asturian (which is generally considered the normative variety of Asturian). The results obtained from this comparison will allow us to outline the differences between these three varieties in terms of object marking, shedding more light on the origin and function of Differential Object Marking in Spanish.