This book provides a qualitative, quantitative, and theoretical analysis of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Catalan within the broader Romance context. The volume begins with a cross-linguistic introduction to the phenomenon, tracing its development and highlighting the role of the semantic hierarchies of animacy and definiteness in its distribution. The following chapter presents an in-depth investigation of usage through a unique survey of over 400 native speakers from all Catalan dialects, examining the oral production and aural acceptability of DOM, and documenting a significant divergence between prescriptive norms and spoken reality. Chapter 3 details the historical expansion of DOM from the 11th to 18th centuries using balanced corpora, arguing that the mechanism is an endogenous development in Catalan that predates intensive Spanish influence. Chapter 4 then turns to the assessment of 20th-century standardization efforts, which successfully reduced DOM in formal writing while it persisted in spontaneous usage. The final chapter situates Catalan DOM within theoretical models, demonstrating the limitations of scale-based and purely case-oriented accounts, and proposing a formal syntactic analysis whereby DOM licenses a [person] feature. Parametric hierarchies are also employed to capture synchronic microvariation and the diachronic evolution of DOM in Catalan. By integrating extensive empirical data with formal theory, this book advances understanding of DOM in Romance and beyond.
