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This paper addresses the distribution of a phonetically null pronoun and the clitic lo referring to a proposition as the direct object (DO) of cognition and communication verbs in Spanish. The use of this null object referring to propositions is found cross-dialectally in Spanish, and this paper argues that the completeness of the proposition constrains in crucial ways the distribution of these two propositional anaphors. The analysis of five different cases in which the DO pronoun refers to an incomplete proposition illustrates that the null object is the anaphor preferred when the proposition being referred to is incomplete, whereas the propositional pronoun lo is preferred to refer to complete propositions. Completeness of the proposition - defined here as a gradient feature and not a binary distinction - is discussed in relation to the notion of saliency or accessibility of the referent and the data analyzed in this article for propositional anaphora is discussed in relation to NP anaphora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article discusses three variable coding properties of Spanish objects: flagging ( a-marking vs. ø-marking), indexing (clitic doubling vs. no doubling), and clitic case form (accusative lo vs. dative le). These properties are essential for the formal identification of grammatical relations. They are triggered by similar parameters that partly overlap and partly show distinct distributions, yet they also challenge the boundaries between direct objects [DO] and indirect objects [IO] and raise the question whether the typological alignment of Spanish (di)transitive clauses is indirective or secundative. The study draws on quantitative and qualitative corpus data on formal, semantic, and discourse properties of core participants in Spanish clauses, relating these properties to the distribution of variable coding. It is concluded that a-marking, clitic doubling, and leísmo are less frequently employed than unmarked objects, no doubling, and accusative case for clitics, that Spanish DO and IO must be taken as extreme points of a more general Object syntactic function, and that, in general, all variable object coding follows an indirective alignment type. Consequently, animate and topical objects are considered as formally and functionally marked atypical objects both in monotransitive and ditransitive clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the results of two studies that investigate the factors contributing to non-native-like ability in child and adult heritage speakers by focusing on oral production of Differential Object Marking (DOM), the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects in Spanish. In study 1, 39 school-age bilingual children (ages 6–17) from the United States and 20 monolingual children from Mexico completed a Story Retelling Task and a Picture Description Task. In study 2, 64 young adult heritage speakers (ages 18–25), 23 adult immigrants to the United States (ages 40–60), and 40 native speakers from Mexico (ages 18–60) completed the same oral tasks. Results showed significant rates of omission of DOM in animate direct objects in all the experimental groups from the United States and ceiling performance in the groups from Mexico (both children and adults). We discuss how the combined effects of reduced input, potential attrition in the first generation of immigrants, incomplete acquisition in the second generation, and transfer from English may account for the persistent patterns of DOM omission with animate and specific direct objects in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the reasons for an argument to be chosen as sentence topic are discussed. I argue that a topic expression can be prototypical or not, depending on how its thematic/semantic properties reflect humans' preference to talk about certain things and not others. Although subjects are mostly prototypical topics, I show that a non-subject topic is prototypical with predicates that select a patient subject and an IO with protoagent properties but volition (psych-verbs, unaccusative verbs). Constructions like passives or arbitrary subjects may also have a prototypical topic object. As for nonprototypical topics, they are generally left dislocated direct objects. Their presence is justified by the fact that discourse needs may overrule the requirement of a topic to be prototypical. In particular, they are used in contrastive contexts. It follows that whenever a topic is non-prototypical, it is automatically interpreted as contrastive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]