Unveiling DOM optionality in Central Catalan

This paper presents data indicative of optionality in acceptance and processing of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in 27 adult bilinguals of central Catalan-Spanish across two tasks: Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) and Self-Paced Reading (SPR). Each task contained four conditions with definiteness and animacy of the direct object (DO) manipulated. DOM is present in Spanish, but prescriptive accounts of Catalan claim that its distribution is much more restricted (GIEC 2016), making cross-linguistic influence possible. Additionally, recent work on Catalan-Spanish bilingualism challenges prescriptive accounts, revealing significant variability and optionality for DOM distribution (e.g. Bel and Benito 2024, Benito 2023, Escandell-Vidal 2009, Perpiñán 2018, Puig-Mayenco et al. 2018, Pineda 2023, Zeugin 2021). This project adds to the scant Catalan DOM studies examining both offline and online data by exploring DOM distribution with full DP DOs in central Catalan as well as the linguistic and extralinguistic factors modulating its distribution. Results reveal that optionality is more evident in the offline AJT compared to the online SPR, where participants demonstrate sensitivity to the ungrammaticality of DOM with inanimate DOs, and with indefinite DOs. Still, results are less conclusive with definite DOs and proper names, indicating some degree of inter-speaker variation in DOM processing.