The Acquisition of Differential Object Marking

Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a linguistic phenomenon that morphologically marks direct objects that are more prominent than others on semantic and pragmatic scales, and in the last few years it has attracted the attention of several subfields of linguistics. DOM has evolved diachronically in many languages, whereas it has disappeared from others; it is well acquired by monolingual children, but presents high instability and variability in bilingual acquisition and language contact situations. This edited collection contributes to further our understanding of the nature and development of DOM in the languages of the world, in acquisition, and in language contact, variation, and change. The thirteen chapters in this volume present new empirical data from Estonian, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, Hindi, Romanian and Basque in different acquisition contexts and learner populations. They also bring together multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives to account for the complexity and dynamicity of this widespread linguistic phenomenon.