Verbal semantics and the diachronic development of DOM in Spanish

The use of the maker a with a direct object in Spanish is an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM), which is cross linguistically a well-documented phenomenon. In Spanish, there are two main dimensions that determine a-marking of direct objects: (i) the semantic and (discourse) pragmatic properties of the direct object, such as animacy, definiteness, specificity and topicality and (ii) the lexical semantics of the verb, such as aktionsart properties and selectional restrictions with respect to the position of the direct object. Diachronically a-marking spreads along the Referentially Hierarchy from personal pronouns nouns and proper names to definite and finally indefinite noun phrases, a process that between has been we examined. In this study, I focus on the influence of the lexical semantics of verb classes on this process. I present original findings from two corpus searches from the 12th to the 20th century. The data show that the diachronic evolution of a-marking crucially depends on the verb semantics of the governing predicate, and that the change proceeds according to the Constant Rate Hypothesis of Kroch. These findings suggest that a-marking in Spanish, and DOM in general, can only be described in a multi-dimensional space consisting of the semantic properties of the direct object and the lexical semantics of the verb.