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Variation in Second and Heritage Languages: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Robert Bayley, Dennis R. Preston and Xiaoshi Li
[Studies in Language Variation 28] 2022
► pp. 311–336

Chapter 12
Differential object marking in heritage and homeland Italian

ORCID logo | Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
ORCID logo | University of Toronto
We examine variable patterns of use of differential object marking (DOM) in conversational Italian recorded in Toronto, Canada, and Calabria, Italy. An exhaustive sample of 366 direct objects, produced by Homeland and three generations of Heritage speakers, shows retention of the DOM system. Successive generations have lower rates of DOM, but this is because they don’t produce enough tokens of certain syntactic and semantic types (e.g., left-dislocated or indefinite pronouns). Thus, they have less opportunity to use DOM: token distributions account for their lower rates. In contexts with sufficient tokens, significant contrasts emerge, indicating that all generations retain the conditioning of relevant factors (Definiteness, Referent of Object, Verb Type, Dislocation). No effects of social network or linguistic practices emerged.
Keywords: Differential Object Marking, heritage language, Italian, comparative variationist sociolinguistics, syntactic variation, Toronto, Calabria, attrition, object pronouns, prepositions, ethnic orientation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The status of DOM in Romance languages
  • Methods
  • Results
    • Modeling DOM where it is expected
    • Non-canonical use of DOM
    • (Non)-effects of ethnic orientation
  • Summary of findings
  • Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.28.12dis
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