Empirical analysis of DOM in Spanish: Iconicity and economy forces driven by a harmonic tension

Abstract

Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a linguistic phenomenon of many languages like Spanish, in which the preposition ‘a’ appears before direct objects. Current theory states that this phenomenon is ruled by the tension between iconicity (markedness) and economy (omission), In order to test this hypothesis, a 218-million tweets corpora representing all varieties of Spanish was used. 4,967 DOM cases showing marking, omission and optional marking were found in the Colombian Spanish corpus, which were tagged manually with 12 binary features and used to study other varieties. Through statistical analysis, it was discovered that this phenomenon is ruled by two highly correlated (r=0,92) tensions that can be associated with iconicity (13,47%) and economy (86,53%). This finding suggests that these tensions are not independent but rather controlled by a common factor named, in this study, as harmonic tension. This study provides the degree of importance of the features analyzed, which is used to propose a new feature hierarchy that confirms empirically other small ones proposed before. It can be concluded that this harmonic tension is an empirical plausible model to demonstrate the percentage of DOM in Spanish.