Accusative object marking

Abstract

Although accusative object marking has been widely studied in Spanish, there do not appear to be sociolinguistic studies addressing its variation and possible change, despite evidence of loss of the marker from Dominican Spanish. This paper describes the findings of a study on the marking of human accusative objects in Cuban Spanish that compared two time periods and two generational cohorts with spoken data from the 1960s and 1990s. A significantly lower rate of object marking was found for the later time period, as well as similar rates for one generational cohort studied at both times. The findings of a logistic regression analysis suggested that loss of the object marker is a change in progress constrained by definiteness of the object. It is shown that the pattern found here for Cuban Spanish is more similar to Old Spanish than to Modern Spanish.