Two Kinds of Differential Object Marking in Portuguese and Spanish

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Two kinds of differential object marking in Portuguese and Spanish

Scott A. SchwenterThe Ohio State University

Portuguese is typically not considered a differential object marking (DOM) language, while Spanish, with its accusative a, is one of the most well-known DOM languages. This chapter uses quantitative multivariate analysis to argue that Portuguese – both Brazilian (BP) and European (EP) – displays a clear-cut DOM system. Unlike Spanish, however, the Portuguese DOM system is limited to strictly anaphoric direct object referents. Both BP and EP oppose null objects with overt pronominal marking of anaphoric DOs, even though the pronouns employed differ in each variety. In both Spanish and Portuguese, animacy, definiteness and specificity constrain the encoding of direct object referents in similar ways; most notably, the hierarchical ordering of these constraints is the same across the two languages.

Keywords: direct objects, null elements, variation, differential object marking

1. Introduction

Differential object marking (DOM) is the name given to the morphosyntactic distinc-tion made in some languages between direct objects that receive some kind of special morphological indicator (such as a case morpheme or a preposition) and those direct objects that do not (Bossong, 1985). In general, objects that co-occur with DOM are much less frequent than objects that do not, hence the general idea that such objects are “marked” not only in the overt linguistic sense by containing some additional ma-terial, but also in terms of being non-prototypical objects while those objects that do not receive such marking are the (more) prototypical ones. Among the Romance languages, Spanish and Romanian are well-known DOM varieties, employing the prepositions a and pe, respectively, to mark a subset of their direct objects (the charac-teristics of this subset will be discussed below in greater detail). The examples in (1) illustrate the contrast between an a-marked DO in Spanish (1a), with a human/spe-cific referent, and a non-marked DO, with an inanimate (1b):


Scott A. Schwenter

(1) a. Vi a la profesora de tu clase de estadística. ‘I saw the professor of your statistics class.’ b. Vi ∅ la lámpara que tú querías comprar. ‘I saw the lamp that you wanted to buy.’

Portuguese, by contrast, is not typically included among lists of DOM languages, even though it also uses a (the “objeto direto preposicionado” of Cunha & Cintra, 2002) to mark a subset of its direct objects. This subset, however, is much smaller and more restricted than that which is marked by a in Spanish, especially in the spoken lan-guage, where a-marking in Brazilian Portuguese is essentially moribund (Ramos, 1989), with the well-known exceptions of the a that appears, variably, before Deus ‘God’, before stressed personal object pronouns in direct object function, and also, but still infrequently, prior to the direct objects of the verb amar. Indeed, this extremely exceptional use of the “prepositional accusative” is widely-recognized by Portuguese grammars and other reference works of the language. Thomas (1969, p. 256), for in-stance, notes that a is used to mark a “personal direct object” and that this use “is heard with nouns which refer to God, and very infrequently [my emphasis] with personal pronouns”. Thomas gives the examples in (2) and (3), but notates (3) as “Rare”:

(2) Devemos amar a Deus. ‘We should love God.’ (3) Incomoda alguém se abro a janela? – A mim não incomoda. ‘Will it bother anyone if I open the window? It won’t bother me.’

More generally, research on direct objects in Portuguese has tended to focus on the lack of marking par excellence, i.e. on the widespread phenomenon of null objects in both European and Brazilian Portuguese (Raposo, 1986; Cyrino, 1997), while research on their Spanish counterparts has focused on the presence of extra marking in the form of the accusative a. However, unlike the direct objects in Spanish marked by a, in Portuguese the objects of interest are strictly anaphoric in nature, and variability is found between null objects (4), clitic pronouns (mainly in EP), as in (5), tonic pro-nouns (exclusively in BP) as shown in (6), and also by repetitions of lexical NPs as in (7), where the NP essa mentalidade ‘that mentality’ had been mentioned several claus-es prior:1

(4) Quando há outras coisas para fazer, fazemos Ø a bordo. [EP: pf0149pu] ‘When there are other things to do, we do Ø on board’ (5) Eu não os podia calçar de maneira nenhuma. [EP: pf1261pu] ‘I could not put them [=shoes] on at all.’ (6) Aí, ele levou ele para o caminhão, levaram ele para o hospital. [BP: PEUL, E15] ‘Then, he took him to the truck, they took him to the hospital.’

1. See below for a description of the corpora from which these BP and EP examples were taken.



(7) e notei exactamente cristalizada essa mentalidade [pf1378pu] ‘and I noted that that way of thinking was totally entrenched’

With the exception of Schwenter & Silva (2003) and Schwenter (2006), however, there has been no attempt to connect the variability between the different anaphoric DO forms in BP and EP, on the one hand, with the variability between a and non-marked DOs in Spanish, on the other. In abstract terms, what I will be suggesting in this chap-ter is that we can learn much more about the similarities between the two languages if we do a fuller comparison of their overall systems of object marking, instead of re-stricting our attention to their more unique, and seemingly opposing, object-marking characteristics. In addition, I will show how multivariate analysis can reveal underly-ing similarities across dialects and languages even when the surface phenomena in question differ. Concretely, I will show that the cross-linguistic constraints on DOM in Spanish, which occurs nearly exclusively on non-anaphoric DO NPs, are parallel to those on the formal realization of anaphoric DOs in Portuguese. At the cross-dialectal level, I will show that, despite well-known surface distinctions between Brazilian and European Portuguese related to null objects, clitics and tonic pronouns, the ways in which anaphoric DOs in these varieties are realized are likewise similarly constrained.

The rest of this paper is structured as follows: in Section 2 I will present the results of a quantitative empirical study of a-marking across three dialects of Spanish (Tippets & Schwenter, 2007; Tippets, 2010), in order to reveal the conditioning factors affecting the variation between a and Ø with direct objects in naturally-occurring speech. In Sections 3 and 4, I will present the results of a quantitative study of anaphoric direct objects in both Brazilian (Section 3) and European (Section 4) Portuguese, showing that the conditioning factors in both languages are similar, and have similar results on the overall system of DO marking, even though the realm of such marking is different in the two languages. Section 5 makes the comparison between the two languages ex-plicit, and suggests that both have differential object marking, but it is applied primar-ily to different kinds of DOs. Section 6 presents conclusions to be drawn from the quantitative analysis of these varieties of Portuguese and Spanish.

2. Variation in the (non-) use of the accusative a in Spanish DOM

In order to provide a basis for the comparison below with Portuguese, in this section I will briefly present the results of an empirical, corpus-based study of DOM in Spanish, comparing three dialects: Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Mexico City. One of the most important contributions that studies of morphosyntactic variation have made to lin-guistic theorizing in the past 30 years is to put to the test competing qualitative hy-potheses about the factors influencing the use or non-use of a given morphosyntactic variant. In recent years, there has been a huge surge of DOM studies (following


Scott A. Schwenter

primarily on the heels of the seminal paper by Aissen, 2003), but nevertheless very little empirical quantitative investigation of the phenomenon. DOM is found in the Spanish accusative a (a.k.a. “personal” a, prepositional accusative), as in (8)–(10) be-low, which alternates with the non-marked variant in (11):

(8) Oye, yo a las seis también me quiero ir. Que me gustaría ir a buscar a mi madre a casa. (HCMadrid)

Hey, at six I also have to go. I’d like to go look for A my mom at home. (9) Yo defendí a un muchacho que había sido acusado... (HCMex) I defended A a guy that had been accused... (10) Sí, cuáles son los valores que rigen a esa gente... (HCBA) Yes, what are the values that govern A those people... (11) Pero no me puedo despertar muy tarde--- porque tengo que ir a casa temprano,

cambiarme, buscar Ø las cosas para la Alianza. (HCBA) But I can’t wake up late, because I have to go home early, change, look for Ø

the things for the Alliance.

As is well-known, there are a number of often competing motivations for a-marking discussed in the literature, many of which have been summarized by overviews such as that of Laca (2006) or the edited volume of contributions in Pensado (1995). Most prominent among these motivations are the animacy of the DO (leading to the peda-gogical label of “personal a” in English); the specificity of the DO (von Heusinger & Kaiser, 2003; Leonetti, 2004, 2008; Brugè & Brugger, 1996); and various discourse and pragmatic functions, such as discourse prominence, individuation and exceptionality (Weissenrieder, 1985, 1990, 1991; Kliffer, 1984), topicality (Leonetti, 2004), “discursive and scenic prominence” (Dumitrescu, 1997), among many others.

Nearly all of the extensive prior literature, on Spanish DOM has examined a-marking via native-speaker intuition (Leonetti, 2004; Torrego, 1999), through the con-sideration of what one might call “curio” examples (Weissenrieder, 1985), or as found in written documents (Company Company, 2002; Laca, 2002, 2006). The different mo-tivations for DOM listed above are also often considered in isolation of the others. In addition, the two possibilities for object marking, i.e. the presence or absence of a pre-ceding a DO, are often not explicitly considered competing variants of the same mor-phosyntactic variable. The results to be presented in this section depart from these tendencies by focusing on speech from naturally-occurring corpora, and also by con-sidering the variability between a and Ø before direct objects to be crucial. The guid-ing assumption is that a range of different factors impact DOM, and quantitative, multivariate analysis can disentangle the relative importance of these factors. This view is consonant with assumptions made by Aissen (2003) in her non-quantitative OT analysis of DOM across languages. As we will see below, the same can be said for the phenomenon of anaphoric direct object marking in Portuguese.



Based on the findings of previous qualitative research such as the studies men-tioned above, Schwenter and Tippets (2007) and later in much more detail, Tippets (2010) formulated a number of research questions, in order to test these questions via quantitative multivariate analysis. The overarching research question of interest was: What is the hierarchy of constraints on DOM in Spanish, and specifically what are the relative effects of the different independent variables that have been proposed in the (qualitative) literature on the phenomenon? Occurrences of DOs were culled from similar corpora of spoken Spanish (oral interviews from the Habla Culta de Buenos Aires (HCBA, 1987), the Habla Culta de Madrid (HCM, 1984) and Habla Culta de México (HCMex, 1981)) in order to contrast and compare dialects. The envelope of variation for the study was determined by first extracting all the direct objects in each corpus, and then examining and coding both the overtly a-marked and non-marked tokens. Excluded from the analysis were personal pronouns occurring with DO func-tion (e.g., mí ‘me’ and ti ‘you’), since these always occur with accusative a marking. All of the extracted tokens were coded for the following factors:

– Animacy of Direct Object – human > animate > inanimate– Relative Animacy of Subject and Direct Object – Greater, Same, Lesser (see ex-

amples [8]-[11] above)– Specificity of Direct Object – whether the referent of the DO was uniquely identi-

fiable (cf. Laca, 2002)– Definiteness of Direct Object – a discourse pragmatic property, is the DO referent

associated with a definite expression that can be identified with an already intro-duced discourse item (von Heusinger & Kaiser, 2003)

– Mass vs. Count Noun– Number – singular vs. plural– (Noun) Form of the Direct Object – pronoun, proper name, lexical noun– Presence of a same-referent clitic pronoun (“clitic doubling” of the DO) – yes or no

Multivariate analysis was carried out on the extracted data using GoldVarb X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte, & Smith, 2005). In interpreting the results of a multivariate analysis us-ing GoldVarb X, several different types of evidence are employed. First, the probabili-ties or “factor weights” of each individual factor that, in theory, can range from 0 to 1, are considered. The key “weight” for interpretation however is that of .50, which means that a particular value of an independent variable (or, in Varbrul parlance, of a factor in a factor group) neither favors nor disfavors the variant in question. Results above .50 denote that the value favors the variant, and results below .50 mean that the value dis-favors the variant. Second, the order of the values within each independent variable shows the hierarchy of these values and, along with their factor weights, allow the ana-lyst to discern the impact of individual factors inside a given factor group (such as animate vs. inanimate or specific vs. non-specific) on the variation. Thirdly, the “range” consists of the distance between the factor weights of the most and the least favoring factors (i.e. independent variables) within a factor group. By comparing the ranges of


Scott A. Schwenter

distinct factor groups, the analyst can effectively order the factor groups in terms of their relative impact on the variation, where the factor group with the largest range has the greatest impact on the variation, the factor group with the next largest range the next greatest, etc. Lastly, the GoldVarb program itself determines the statistical sig-nificance of different analyses of the data, and presents the factor groups chosen as significant in order (which should coincide with the range value mentioned above). The multivariate analysis results in the configuration of significant factor groups pre-sented in Table 1 below for the three dialects analyzed:2

The constraint hierarchies and relative magnitude of the factor groups DO Ani-macy and DO Definiteness across the three dialects are remarkably similar: they are the most and second-most significant FGs, respectively, in each dialect. The Specificity of the DO is the next-most significant FG in both Buenos Aires and Madrid, but does

Table 1. Significant Factor Groups for Spanish DOM, by Dialect (Tippets, 2010).

Buenos Aires N = 1001

Madrid N = 467

Mexico City N = 622

DO AnimacyHuman .89 (65% a-marked) .97 (77%) .95 (78%)Metaphorical .69 (39%) .82 (39%) .66 (47%)Inanimate .28 (4%) .17 (3%) .12 (4%)Range 61 80 83

DO DefinitenessDefinite .62 (28%) .57 (31%) .67 (41%)Indefinite .29 (14%) .36 (16%) .28 (25%)No determiner .21 (10%) N/A .06 (5%)Range 41 21 61

DO SpecificitySpecific .60 (30%) .59 (31%) N/SNon-specific .36 (13%) .39 (19%) N/SRange 24 20

DO NumberSingular N/S N/S .61 (38%)Plural N/S N/S .35 (28%)Range 26

2. Although a few other factor groups achieved statistical significance, Tippets (2010) notes that interactions between FGs and/or extremely small numbers of tokens make their results less reliable than those shown in Table 1. The FGs in Table 1 are the ones that, according to Tippets, provide both reliable and valid results.



not achieve statistical significance in the Mexico City data where, instead, the Number of the DO is more significant. Looking at the internal constraint ranking of individual factors in the shared FGs, we also find that the relative ordering of the factors is the same across the three dialects, revealing that the effects of these characteristics on the choice of accusative a in Spanish are similar. In particular, human, definite, specific and/or singular DO referents are those that are most likely to be marked by a, while inanimate, indefinite/no determiner, non-specific, and plural referents are those that are most likely not to be a-marked, i.e. to not show DOM. Despite these similarities, however, the results also evince some clear differences between the dialects, such as the non-significance of Specificity in Mexico City and the favoring effect of Number in that dialect instead (for much more detailed discussion see Tippets, 2010).

As these results illustrate, a variationist perspective on the array of semantic, prag-matic and syntactic features that motivate a-marking of direct objects in Spanish, and also on what motivates DOM more generally across languages, can go a long way to-ward revealing the hierarchical organization and interaction of internal factors that have been singled out individually in the literature as being important to this case of variation. Indeed, it could be argued that only through multivariate analysis of quantita-tive data can the features that systematically regulate DOM in Spanish be clearly delin-eated (Tippets, 2010), even though other such features may prove useful to fine-grained analyses of isolated, decontextualized examples as well. What I will show in the sections that follow is that this kind of multivariate analysis is useful for comparing not only across dialects such as the three in this section, which is typical of the approach known as “comparative sociolinguistics” (Poplack & Tagliamonte, 2001; Tagliamonte, 2002), but also across languages. Indeed, although the DO-related phenomena of Spanish and Portuguese have not often been linked (but see Schwenter, 2006), it will be shown that there is clear parallelism as to how variant realizations of DO referents are made in both languages, and also across Brazilian and European varieties of Portuguese.

3. ADO marking in Brazilian Portuguese

The BP data analyzed for this study were extracted from the PEUL (Programa de Estu-dos sobre o Uso da Língua) corpus of spoken Rio de Janeiro Portuguese, and were previ-ously presented and discussed in Schwenter & Silva (2003). The first part of the PEUL corpus was a broad-scale sociolinguistic survey of the Rio area in 1980,3 utilizing socio-linguistic interviews and surveying speakers with elementary to postgraduate education and between the ages of 9 and 60 years. For this chapter, the data have been completely re-coded and subsequently analyzed via multivariate analysis using GoldVarb X. In the 2003 paper, the data were analyzed only in terms of overall frequency and rate of

3. A “recontact” study of some of the speakers in the original 1980 PEUL sample was carried out in 2000 and is now available.


Scott A. Schwenter

Table 2. Overall frequency of ADO variants in BP.

ADO FORM N

Null 909 (72.5%)Clitic Pronoun 4 (0.3%)Lexical NP 193 (15.4%)Tonic Pronoun 151 (12.0%)TOTAL 1253

occurrence, and the relative effects of the distinct independent variables were other-wise not revealed. For the present analysis, by contrast, individual tokens were coded for six different independent variables (i.e. factor groups): Animacy, Definite-ness, Number, Specificity, Referential Distance, and Topic Persistence. I will explain how these variables were coded below in more detail, but first it will be useful to look at the BP data in global terms and contextualize the results a bit with respect to trends in BP.

In Table 2 appear the overall frequencies of each ADO form as found in the over 1200 tokens extracted from the PEUL corpus of spoken BP. Null objects make up, by far, the most frequent coding choice for ADOs, at 72.5%. Conversely, as mentioned above, clitic pronouns are essentially left unemployed in spoken BP, with only four tokens (a mere 0.3% of the total N) found in the dataset. Lexical NPs and tonic pro-nouns are found at rather similar frequencies, 15.4% and 12.0%, respectively, though as we will see below, the conditions favoring the occurrence of these two forms are rather distinct.

Much of the prior literature on the realization of ADOs in BP has focused on one of two features that figure prominently in Table 2. On the one hand, the extremely high frequencies of null objects have attracted the attention of many scholars, especially syntacticians, who have been interested in the nature of these null elements and their significance for syntactic theory. Relatedly, null objects have been a key player in com-parative analyses of BP and EP, and the differences between them have been used to argue for important theoretical differences in the structures of the two varieties and, correspondingly, to the characterization of these null elements of being of one or an-other type in generative frameworks.

On the other hand, interest has also been paid to the use of the tonic pronouns for direct object function, and in particular the third person tonic pronouns ele(s) and ela(s). Some scholars (e.g., Bagno, 2000; Naro & Scherre, 2000) cite this use as archaic in nature, already having been found in older forms of EP, and provide literary exam-ples to back up these claims. Others (e.g., Camara, 1955, 1972) note that there is no continuous use of these forms as direct object pronouns in EP, and indeed in modern-day EP there is no use of these forms at all for direct object function. As diachronic data from BP have made clear (Duarte, 1989; Tarallo, 1996, etc.), the rise in the use of



the nominative pronouns for ADO function is actually a quite recent phenomenon in this variety, and in fact appears to be an innovation; Camara (1972, p. 85) calls it “an autonomous structural fact” of BP–one that is unrelated to the much older (and much more sporadic) use of these same forms in medieval varieties of EP. The possible reason(s) behind the rise of the nominative pronouns for ADO function will become clearer throughout the course of this paper.

The set of independent variables included in the multivariate analysis below fo-cuses on several different properties of the DO referent and the discourse context in which it appears and is similar in many respects to the variables examined in the study of Spanish a reported in Section 2 above. Animacy is one of the most important and ubiquitous concepts in the coding of linguistic phenomena in the languages of the world (Dahl, 2008). For direct objects especially, animacy has significant effects, since it affects the variable coding that is found across languages with differential object marking. A typical hierarchy for animacy marking, from most to least animate, would be as follows, drawing on Comrie (1989), following Silverstein (1976):

1, 2 > 3 > proper name > human > animate > inanimate4

While such hierarchies are common and are often developed and refined, in the analy-sis of naturally-occurring corpus data, it is often the case that one or more of the ani-macy levels does not occur with sufficient frequency in order to merit making such a distinction. In this study, I distinguished solely between human, animate and inani-mate direct object referents. In addition, since the variation examined here is restricted to 3rd person referents, the distinction between 1st/2nd (which are always human, or at the very least anthropomorphized) vs. 3rd (which can be human, animate or inani-mate) is not needed. In the end, as will be seen below, the distinction was eventually collapsed to a binary distinction between animates vs. inanimates. Still, though, nearly all the referents coded as animate were actually human referents.

The factor groups of definiteness and specificity are closely intertwined, in that they both refer to the “identifiability” of a referent in discourse. Following the proce-dure in Schwenter & Silva (2003), they are nevertheless operationalized differently, as they were in the study of Spanish DOM by Tippets (2010) whose results are shown in Section 2. Definiteness is taken as a formal criterion, whereby NPs with markers of definiteness or indefiniteness (see Abbott, 2004) are coded accordingly as such. Speci-ficity, which Lyons (1999) argues is related yet at the same time somewhat orthogonal to definiteness, since most definites are also specific but not invariably so, is inter-preted in more subjective terms, by judging whether the referent in question refers to

4. As noted by Corbett (2000), number is also highly intertwined with animacy, insofar as elements on the left of this hierarchy will be more likely to show number differentiation cross-linguistically, while elements on the right will not. There is also an implicational relationship to the hierarchy, whereby if a given element is marked for number, it will imply that elements to its left will also be so marked.


Scott A. Schwenter

a unique token of a given referent-type (specific), or whether the referent could be re-placed by another token of the same referent-type without affecting interpretation (non-specific). By operationalizing these notions in this way, it was possible to test their effects on the variation separately.5

While the category of number (singular vs. plural) was fairly straightforward for data coding purposes, the factor groups referential distance and topic persistence are most likely less familiar to readers. These measures, originally due to Givón (1983), are separate quantitative operationalizations of the often qualitatively-determined notion of topicality. They are also complementary, in that one of them, referential distance, is a “look back” measure of topicality, while topic persistence is a “look forward” measure. Referential distance looks back to the last mention of the same referent in the dis-course, and counts (in clauses) the distance from the token in question to that last men-tion, as in (12), where the referential distance measured from ele2 would be the distance in clauses back to the last mention of the same referent (ele1), in this case one clause:

(12) Aí, ele levou ele1 para o caminhão, levaram ele2 para o hospital. ‘Then, he took him to the truck, they took him to the hospital.’ [PEUL, E15]

For this study, an upper limit was set at 9 clauses back, and in the final analysis only the binary contrast between 1–4 clauses back and 5+ clauses back was found to be signifi-cant. Topic persistence, on the other hand, counts the number of subsequent mentions of the same referent in the following 10 clauses, thereby providing a built-in upper limit of 10 mentions. In (12), for instance, if there were no subsequent mention of the referent corresponding to ele in the following discourse, then the topic persistence score with respect to the token ele1 would be one (i.e. the ele2 token in the subsequent clause), while for ele2 the topic persistence score would be zero, since there are no fur-ther mentions of the same referent. For the final analysis, the most important division was found to obtain between those tokens with 0–2 subsequent mentions versus those with 3 or more subsequent mentions. In both cases, either preceding or following men-tions could be made via any NP form or indeed could be interpreted as a null object.

In Table 3, I present the results of three separate multivariate analyses of the BP data.6 Each analysis takes a different coding option, or variant of the ADO variable, as its application value, i.e. the probability that the particular coding option in question is favored or disfavored by the factors in a factor group (a.k.a. values of an independent variable). The three coding options at issue for BP are the tonic pronoun (ele[s], ela[s]), the null object (∅), or a lexical NP that repeats (albeit not necessarily in verbatim fashion) the referent of the ADO in question. Looking first at the constraints on the

5. The independent effects of definiteness and specificity on the variation can be seen below in the results of the multivariate analysis. Cross-tabulations of these two factors were also car-ried out to ensure their independence.6. Non-significant factor groups in the analysis are presented within square brackets for com-parative purposes.



Table 3. Multivariate analysis of Brazilian Portuguese ADOs, by variant.

N (% data)

Tonic Pronoun (n = 151, input .02 [12.1%])

Null Object

(n = 909, input .76 [72.5%])

Lexical NP

(n = 193, input .15 [15.4%])

Prob % Prob % Prob %

AnimacyAnimate 338 (27%) .89 39.9% .25 45.6% [.50] 14.5%Inanimate 915 (73%) .31 1.7% .60 82.5% [.50] 15.7%

Range 58 35DefinitenessDefinite 641 (51%) .73 22.8% .37 59.6% .58 17.6%Indefinite 612 (49%) .27 0.8% .64 86.1% .41 13.1%

Range 46 27 17SpecificitySpecific 383 (31%) .73 33.9% [.45] 52.7% .39 13.3%Non-Spec. 870 (69%) .39 2.4% [.52] 81.3% .55 16.3%

Range 34 16NumberSingular 1124 (90%) [.51] 12.1% .48 71.9% .52 16%Plural 129 (10%) [.39] 11.6% .68 78.3% .36 10.1%

Range 20 16Referential Distance1–4 clauses 1120 (89%) [.51] 12.4% [.49] 72.1% [.50] 15.4%5+ clauses 133 (11%) [.40] 9% [.54] 75.9% [.50] 15%

Topic Persistence0–2 mentions 1143 (91%) [.49] 10.9% .51 73.9% [.49] 15.1%3+ mentions 110 (9%) [.63] 23.6% .39 58.2% [.57] 18.2%

Range 12

tonic pronoun variant, we see that there are three significant factor groups affecting this variant: animacy, definiteness, and specificity, in that order. Tonic pronouns are favored heavily by animate referents (.90), nearly all of which are human referents, and quite heavily disfavored by inanimates (.31). Definiteness is the next most significant factor group (Range 46), and tonic pronouns are heavily favored by definite referents


Scott A. Schwenter

(.73) and heavily disfavored by indefinite referents (.27). Lastly, specificity also signifi-cantly impacts the tonic pronoun variant with a range of 34. Specific referents heavily favor tonic pronouns (.73) while such pronouns are disfavored by non-specific refer-ents (.39).

Considering now the null object variant, we encounter a striking contrast with the tonic pronouns. For both animacy and definiteness, the results for null objects are es-sentially the mirror image of those for tonic pronouns. Animate referents disfavor null objects highly (.25), while inanimates favor null objects to a certain extent (.60). Defi-nite referents disfavor null objects (.37), while indefinites favor this variant (.64). Again, these results are precisely the opposite of what was found for tonic pronouns, where both animate referents and definite referents were a favoring context for the pronouns, and inanimates and indefinites were a disfavoring context. Two other sig-nificant factor groups for the null object variant are number and topic persistence. In the first case, singular direct object referents favor null realization at .68, while plural referents slightly disfavor null realization at .48. In the second case, less persistent DO referents, i.e. those that are mentioned only 0–2 more times in the subsequent dis-course, are essentially neutral at .51, neither favoring or disfavoring null realization. However, when referents are mentioned 3 or more times in the subsequent discourse, null objects are strongly disfavored at .38. In other words, more persistently topical object referents are less likely to be null relative to the average probability, and more likely to be realized overtly in some fashion (i.e., as either a tonic pronoun or as a lexi-cal NP). Interestingly, even though the factor group topic persistence did not result in significance in the case of the tonic pronouns, the probabilities are again somewhat distinct when compared to those of the null objects, especially in the case of 3 or more mentions in the subsequent discourse, which favors the tonic pronoun at .63, versus the strong disfavoring effect of .38 for null objects. Thus, the tonic pronoun shows a clear tendency for co-occurrence with more topical DO referents than does the null object variant.

The last variant under analysis in Table 3 is the lexical NP, which as noted above may be either a verbatim repetition of a previously-mentioned lexical NP or it may be some paraphrased version of the same referent. In many ways, the lexical NP variant in BP (but not in EP, see below) appears to be a kind of "middle ground" between the tonic pronoun and the null object variants. While neither animates nor inanimates are favored by lexical NPs, in other ways they lie in between the tonic pronoun and the null object, e.g., by being favored by definite NP referents, but not as much as tonic pronouns are, and also by being favored by singular referents, but not as much as null objects are. On the other hand, lexical NPs are disfavored by non-specific referents to an even greater degree than null objects are. While it is beyond the scope of this chap-ter to pursue this matter further, it could be suggested that the repetition of lexical NPs represents a kind of avoidance strategy for both tonic pronouns (which can be stigmatized, especially by more educated speakers, even though they also use them



frequently, see for example Bagno, 2000) and null objects, which are obviously a high-ly inexplicit resumptive strategy. Even though the factor group of topic persistence did not result in statistical significance for the lexical NP variant, the fact that more persis-tent NP referents favor lexical NPs suggests that more topical referents – here opera-tionalized as those that occur 3 or more times in the subsequent discourse after a given mention – more generally favor overt realization, since tonic pronouns were also fa-vored by referents with this same level of persistence. Null objects, on the other hand, were strongly disfavored by such referents, suggesting the lower topicality of their ref-erents relative to those encoded by the other two variants.

In Table 4, I provide a summary of the most significant factor groups emerging from the multivariate analysis provided in Table 3 above. The most important general-ization to be drawn from these results, which will become even more vital after analyzing the EP data in the next section, is that the factors that favor tonic pronoun encoding are those that disfavor null objects. Thus, both animacy and definiteness, the two factor groups that had the most impact on the variation as seen in Table 3 above, have opposite effects on tonic pronouns versus null objects. Animate/definite (and specific) referents favor encoding by tonic pronouns, while these same factors disfavor null objects. Put differently, inanimacy and indefiniteness favor null objects. As can be seen, lexical NPs show a rather different pattern; this fact will be taken up further be-low in Section 5.

4. ADO marking in European Portuguese

Unlike the case of Brazilian Portuguese, where variable phenomena have been ana-lyzed empirically for many years and by a comparatively greater number of scholars, much less is known about modern-day variation in European Portuguese,7 and quite unfortunately most of what is assumed to be true of EP has not been empirically veri-fied. One clear case of this lack of empirical backing can be found in the realm of ADO marking, where it has been taken for granted that the third-person clitic pronouns that are now mainly lost in BP are used not only in contexts where BP uses the innovative

Table 4. Summary of Results of BP Multivariate Analysis.

TONIC Pronoun Null Object Lexical NP

Animate Favors Disfavors N/ADefinite Favors Disfavors FavorsPlural Number N/A Disfavors DisfavorsSpecific Favors N/A Favors

7. For recent studies on variability of clitic position in EP, see de Andrade (2010) and Wash-ington (2012).


Scott A. Schwenter

third-person nominative pronouns for ADOs, but also in the contexts where BP em-ploys null objects. This position is rather odd in view of the fact that Raposo’s (1986) important study of null objects in Portuguese, which could plausibly be said to initiate the interest in null objects in Portuguese, concentrated on EP data, or at least on the intuitions of EP speakers. Thus, part of the necessary purpose in this section of the chapter is to bring to light – for the first time, as far as I know – the true patterns of ADO coding in naturally-occurring spoken EP.8

To carry out the analysis, I utilized the oral sub-corpus of the Corpus de Referên-cia do Português Contemporâneo (CRPC), which was compiled by the Centro de Lin-guística da Universidade de Lisboa (CLUL) and is available freely from their website.9 Tokens of anaphoric direct objects, as coded by clitics, null objects, and lexical NPs, were extracted from 140 sociolinguistic interviews conducted between 1970 and 1974, consisting of over 106,000 words. Interviewees in the corpus were drawn from all re-gions of Portugal, including the Azores, and represented varied ages, occupations, and educational levels.

In Table 5, I present the overall frequency results of the different coding strategies uncovered for ADOs in EP. To provide a point of comparison, the results presented above in Table 2 for BP are repeated here in a separate column next to the EP results, with the latter in boldface. In italics are the results from the two different types of pro-noun, clitic and tonic, which are the coding options that most authors assume differ-entiate the two varieties, at least in qualitative terms.

One of the most striking parallels between the two dialects is that null objects are the most frequent realization of ADOs in both varieties. Null objects are considerably more frequent, however, in BP than in EP, while the converse is true in the case of lexical NPs, whose frequency in EP is more than double their frequency in BP. Clitic pronouns are the least frequent coding option in EP, just as tonic pronouns are in BP. However, given the common assumption in the literature that EP tends to use clitic

Table 5. Overall frequency of ADO variants in EP.

EP BP

Null 374 (40.6%) 909% (72.5%)Clitic Pronoun 208 (22.6%) 4 (0.3%)Lexical NP 339 (36.8%) 193 (15.4%)Tonic Pronoun 0 151 (12.0%)TOTAL 921 1253

8. Prior studies comparing written BP and EP have found great discrepancies in the fre-quency of use of third-person clitic pronouns (Cyrino, 2001; Kato & Raposo, 2001)9. <www.clul.ul.pt/en/resources/183-reference-corpus-of-contemporary-portuguese-crpc>



pronouns where BP employs null objects, this result is rather unexpected. Finally, and not surprisingly, tonic pronouns are not found in the EP data for ADOs at all, just as clitic pronouns were virtually absent from BP (only 4 of 1253 tokens).

The multivariate analyses of the EP data is presented in Table 6 below, following the same format as the presentation of the BP data above, where the individual analy-ses of the three variants are presented in separate columns. Note however that the clitic pronoun variant in EP replaces the tonic pronoun variant in BP as the leftmost variant in the table. The placement in the tables of these pronouns is done purposely in order to bring out the similarities in the constraints that regulate their occurrence, as will be discussed in greater detail below.

Examining these results, it makes the most sense to contrast the analyses of the clitic pronouns and the null object, since these are essentially mirror images of each other with respect to the factor groups included in the analysis, in similar fashion to the case of BP above. We will return to the case of lexical NPs, for both BP and EP, below in Section 5. Animacy, definiteness, specificity and plurality all favor the coding of ADOs as clitic pronouns, as does lesser referential distance. Conversely, inanimacy, indefiniteness, non-specificity and singular number all favor the null object variant. The ordering of the factor groups for each variant, as indicated by the Range, is slight-ly different: in the case of clitic pronouns, animacy has the greatest effect on the varia-tion, followed by referential distance, then definiteness, specificity and number. For null objects, the order of significance is definiteness, animacy, specificity and number. Note however that the ranges of the first three factor groups in the case of null objects are nearly identical (19, 18, 17, respectively). Thus, it seems fair to say that definiteness, animacy and specificity have nearly equivalent effects on the variation of null objects when these are contrasted with the other ADO variants.

The case of the referential distance factor group in EP is especially interesting since it shows that clitic pronouns are highly disfavored (with a factor weight of .21) in cases where the last mention of the same referent occurs at a distance of 5 or more clauses back in the discourse. Conversely, such referents heavily favor expression as a lexical NP (.70), thereby suggesting that EP speakers prefer to employ the “heavier” option of a lexical NP when bringing a relatively less topical referent back into the discourse (more discussion of this below). The clitic pronoun option, on the other hand, is not chosen in such contexts, presumably due to potential confusion in deter-mining the clitic’s referent. Note also that lexical NPs, unlike the other two variants, are sensitive to topic persistence, being slightly favored (.53) when there are only 0–2 ad-ditional mentions of the same referent, but disfavored when there are 3 or more addi-tional mentions of the same referent (.44). One conclusion to be drawn from these results is that lexical NPs specialize for the coding of relatively less topical referents as measured by both referential distance and topic persistence.

Table 7 below summarizes the results of the EP analysis, in the same way as was done for the BP analysis in Table 4 above. The diametric opposition in the direction of the constraining factors between clitic pronouns and null objects becomes obvious


Scott A. Schwenter

Table 6. Multivariate analysis of European Portuguese ADOs, by variant.

N (% data)

Clitic Pronoun (n=208,

input .17 [22.6%])

Null Object

(n=374, input .39 [40.6%])

Lexical NP

(n=193, input .15 [15.4%])

Prob % Prob % Prob %

AnimacyAnimate 187 (20%) .80 55.1% .36 22.5% .33 22.5%Inanimate 734 (80%) .41 14.3% .54 45.2% .54 40.5%

Range 39 18 21DefinitenessDefinite 499 (54%) .63 32.3% .41 29.3% [.52] 38.5%Indefinite 422 (46%) .35 11.1% .60 54.0% [.47] 34.8%

Range 28 19SpecificitySpecific 229 (25%) .60 39.3% .37 22.3% [.53] 38.4%Non-Spec. 692 (75%) .47 17.1% .54 46.7% [.49] 36.3%

Range 13 17NumberSingular 648 (70%) .44 18.8% .53 42.7% [.51] 38.4%Plural 273 (30%) .63 31.5% .43 35.5% [.48] 33.0%

Range 19 10Referential Distance1–4 clauses 841 (91%) .53 23.7% [.51] 41.5% .48 34.8%5+ clauses 80 (9%) .21 11.2% [.41] 31.2% .70 57.5%

Range 32 22Topic Persistence0–2 mentions 649 (70%) [.48] 20.3% [.48] 39.8% .53 39.9%3+ mentions 272 (30%) [.55] 27.9% [.53] 42.6% .44 29.4%

Range 9



Table 7. Summary of results of EP multivariate analysis.

CLITIC Pronoun Null Object Lexical NP

Animate Favors Disfavors DisfavorsDefinite Favors Disfavors N/APlural Number Favors Disfavors N/ASpecific Favors Disfavors N/A

from this table, as does the relative independence of the constraints on lexical NPs when these are compared to the other two variants. In the next section, I will consider the results for Portuguese ADOs in comparative perspective with Spanish, and argue that, although slightly different in the two varieties, the coding of ADOs in both BP and EP provides us with a clear example of a heretofore-unrecognized system of DOM, whose constraining factors are very similar to the well-known DOM system of Spanish.

5. Portuguese as a differential object marking language? Comparison with Spanish

It is important to recall, for the purposes of this chapter, that Spanish only permits the al-ternation between overt and null marking of direct objects when tonic, post-verbal NPs, including tonic pronouns (e.g. mí, ti), are at issue. Thus, accusative clitic pronouns such as lo(s)/la(s) or, in leísmo dialects where the etymologically dative pronoun le may replace one or both of its accusative counterparts, le(s), are never preceded by the accusative mark-er. This creates an asymmetry between ADOs, which are nearly always coded by clitic pronouns,10 and non-anaphoric DOs, which are not coded by clitics since their referents are not already accessible (or are of low accessibility) in the discourse context. In varieties where leísmo is found extensively, it has been argued that the contrast between ADOs marked by le versus those marked by lo responds to similar pressures such as those found in DOM: le is found for human and definite/specific referents, while lo is found with in-animates. This substitution of le for lo, however, does not extend to the feminine accusative la; leísmo in its most typical configuration only affects masculine ADO referents.

Fernández-Ordóñez (2012) lays out in some detail how different systems of leísmo in Spanish varieties can be considered similar to DOM systems (see also Flores & Melis, 2007). For instance, in the Spanish region of Cantabria, the use of le is found with (in)animate masculine countable singular accusative antecedents, not with femi-nine or plural referents. In Basque Spanish, by contrast, contact between Spanish and Basque has led to a system whereby le refers to human accusative antecedents, both

10. See Reig (2009) for a comparative variationist study of null propositional objects in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish.


Scott A. Schwenter

masculine and feminine, and both singular and plural. The difference between these systems however is that in Basque Spanish le when used to mark direct objects is often in paradigmatic contrast not with the “standard” accusative pronouns lo/la but instead with a null object.11 Similar paradigmatic contrasts are found in Quiteño and Paraguayan Spanish (see Schwenter, 2006), where contact between Quechua and Guaraní, respectively, have led to restructuring and a binary le (human) vs. ∅ (inani-mate) contrast, but has also now led to the standardization of this system even in the speech of monolingual Spanish speakers in these regions (see Yépez, 1986 for Quiteño, and Choi, 2000 for Paraguayan Spanish).

In Brazilian Portuguese, and especially in northeastern varieties (Almeida, 2009, 2011), a superficially similar phenomenon of “lheísmo” is encountered (the term coined by Nascentes [1960], who bases it on the Spanish counterpart). The etymologi-cally dative clitic pronoun lhe(s) is used, by some speakers in some contexts, for accu-sative function primarily with second person referents, which of course are always human. As a dative pronoun, lhe(s) is restricted in reference to human referents, i.e. to recipients, and it is this property of lhe(s) that has led to its “crossover” into the realm of direct object marking. However, just as in Spanish, lheísmo in BP is not, to my knowledge, a uniformly applied marker in any dialect of the language. And, given that this pronoun alternates with the other 2nd person direct objects pronouns te, você, and in the plural vocês, the motivation for the extension of lhe(s) from dative to accusative function does not appear to be based on typical DOM properties such as animacy and specificity, since all these competing pronouns are used for specific animates. Rather, its motivation seems to be due to speakers’ search for a pronoun to distinguish levels of social distance with respect to their interlocutor(s) and also to reflect a more formal register (Almeida, 2009). The exact place of lhe(s) in the pronominal paradigm under investigation here, however, still remains to be determined.

In Table 8 below I have summarized the results for the different ADO coding op-tions in the BP and EP data reported above. This table takes the general patterns found

Table 8. Combined summary results of BP and EP multivariate analysis.

Pronoun (EP clitic/BP tonic) Null Object Lexical NP

Animate Favors Disfavors --------Definite Favors Disfavors --------Plural Number -------- Disfavors --------Specific Favors -------- --------

11. As Fernández-Ordóñez notes (2012, p. 83), “As bilingualism level increases, full gendered accusative pronouns are learned and used for non-human objects (although rarely for humans).” In other words, the more Spanish proficiency, the less use encountered of null objects, which she describes as “prevail[ing] in incipient bilinguals” (ibid.).



in the BP data in Table 3 above and the EP data in Table 5 and combines those that are the same across the two varieties. What the table makes abundantly clear is that there is a clear division of labor between pronouns – BP tonic pronouns and EP clitics – on the one hand, and null objects in both dialects, on the other.

Animacy, definiteness and specificity all favor pronominal expression in both dia-lects, just as these same characteristics favor the overt a marking of non-anaphoric DOs in Spanish, as shown above in Section 2 and also as scores of authors have noted (for an overview see Pensado, 1995). Conversely, animacy, definiteness and plural number all disfavor null object realization. The difference of utmost importance here is not so much between the well-known dialectal discrepancy in the realization of pronominal marking, wherein EP clitics contrast with BP tonic pronouns. As the multivariate anal-yses above show clearly, this contrast in form does not in fact equate to a contrast in function. Despite considerable theoretical discussion in the literature, the difference is likewise not between EP null objects and their BP counterparts, since these also behave rather similarly in both dialects according to the multivariate analysis. Rather, the most significant contrast is to be found in the opposition between the zero-marking of ADOs, i.e. their (non-)realization as null objects, and their overt realization as pronouns. This kind of opposition, which can be seen as a type of additive case-asymmetry in Iggesen’s (2009) terms, is precisely what is found in Spanish and other DOM languages, espe-cially European ones, where the lack of marking on DOs provides a contrast with an overt marker that appears typically on animate/definite/specific DO referents.

The convergence of constraining factors across BP and EP is not of course perfect. There are significant factors in one variety that are not significant in the other, but at least in the case of the pronominal and null object variants, the common factors across each variety show the same direction of effect. What is particularly striking in the case of the pronominal variants is that animacy, definiteness and specificity are also or-dered in the same way across the two dialects, with animacy being the most significant factor group in both varieties. Despite the surface differences between BP tonic pro-nouns and EP clitic pronouns, then, they are both constrained most heavily by animacy, with animate referents (mainly humans) strongly favoring pronominal realization. The factors constraining the null object variant across the two varieties also coincide to a great extent: animacy, definiteness and number are all significant in both BP and EP. However, animacy is the most heavily constraining factor group in BP while, as noted above, definiteness, animacy and specificity are all essentially of equal importance for null objects in EP, insofar as their ranges in the multivariate analysis only differed by one in each instance. Perhaps surprisingly, then, the variants that are most alike across the two varieties are the pronouns, thereby suggesting that the innovative use of 3rd-person tonic pronouns in BP provides a parallel counterpart to the EP clitics, which have been all but eradicated from colloquial spoken BP.

As I pointed out in Schwenter (2006) and noted briefly above, this same type of asymmetry between (one type of) zero-marking of more prototypical DOs, i.e. those that are inanimate, indefinite, and/or non-specific, and the overt marking of less


Scott A. Schwenter

prototypical animate, definite, and/or specific DOs, is also found in South American Spanish dialects such as those spoken in Asunción (Choi, 2000) or Quito (Yépez, 1986), where the accusative clitics lo(s)/la(s) have essentially been lost from the spoken language and leísmo has taken hold, creating a paradigmatic contrast between le-marked non-prototypical ADO referents and zero-marked prototypical ones. The most important contrast in all such cases ends up being a binary one between overtly encoded human/animate ADOs, including first and second person ADOs, which to my knowledge are never null objects in any variety of Portuguese or Spanish, and 3rd person inanimate ADOs which are typically null objects. Put in more general terms, this contrast is being made isomorphically between atypical DO referents and more coding, on the one hand, and typical DO referents and less coding, indeed, no addi-tional coding at all, on the other hand.

Where, then, does the main difference lie between BP and EP in the encoding of ADOs, given the vast overlap between what pronouns code in the two varieties, on the one hand, and what null objects code, on the other? As the multivariate analyses above make clear, it is actually the distribution of the lexical NPs that is most distinct across the two varieties. In EP, there is a clear discourse-functional motivation for lexical NP coding of ADOs, as found in the referential distance weights in Table 6. When the last mention of the referent is 5+ clauses back in the discourse, lexical NPs are heavily fa-vored (.70). Thus, lexical NPs are specialized variants for the re-introduction of refer-ents whose accessibility has been diminished in the ongoing discourse. In BP, by con-trast, the function of lexical NPs is more varied: they are specialized for the coding of definite (.59) and non-specific (.55), but disfavored for indefinite (.41) and specific (.39) referents. Thus, as noted above, lexical NPs in BP appear to have secured a func-tional niche that distinguishes them from both tonic pronouns and null objects, and situates them in between these other two coding options.

Admittedly, the referential and discourse-pragmatic characteristics of the ADO ref-erent are not the only determining factors in DOM systems. Relative animacy between subject and object (Tippets & Schwenter, 2007; Tippets, 2010) and also the lexical se-mantics of the verb and the resultant “affectedness” of the DO (von Heusinger & Kaiser, 2011), for instance, have been shown to also have important effects on Spanish DOM, and will also need to be examined in conjunction with Portuguese ADOs. Nevertheless, the results offered here show quite clearly that speakers’ choices between ADO coding options in Portuguese are tightly constrained by the properties of the ADO referent. What is more, they are constrained in the same way across BP and EP at least as far as the opposition between pronominal encoding and null realization is concerned.

6. Conclusion

In this paper I believe I have demonstrated two things that were not previously part of linguists’ knowledge base regarding Portuguese and its parallels with Spanish. First, I



have argued that Portuguese displays a DOM configuration in its system of ADO cod-ing, through the comparison of the results of multivariate analyses across distinct varieties of Spanish, a well-known DOM language (see Section 2 above), and Portu-guese. The hierarchies of constraints in all three Spanish dialects and in both BP and EP not only contain the same independent variables, but they are also organized in terms of relative strength in the same way. While Portuguese shows little present-day use of accusative a-marking as is found in Spanish (Ramos, 1989; Iemmolo, 2011), the Portuguese ADO system is clearly organized around a number of features related to DO referent characteristics and the status of these referents in discourse (animacy, definiteness, specificity), as well as in some instances to their relative topicality, when this is operationalized by discourse-based measures such as referential distance and topic continuity. The strength of this particular system of ADO marking should be clear from the innovative use of the nominative tonic pronouns in BP. These pronouns were imported from their established use with subjects in order to take over the func-tion of the clitic pronouns that were lost due to phonological changes in the diachrony of BP. By filling the functional gap in this way, BP was able to conserve the differential marking of ADOs that was already found, and continues to persist, in EP.

Secondly, I have shown, via multivariate analysis, that despite a major difference in the encoding of ADOs in BP and EP, namely the lack of 3rd-person clitics in the former variety versus their continued presence in the latter, there is clear parallelism in the un-derlying constraints that guide speaker choices of ADO form. While syntacticians have noted differences between BP and EP not only in the absence/presence of clitics but also in the theoretical status of null objects and other null elements in the two dialects (e.g. Kato, 2001), the independent variables that regulate ADO encoding are extremely simi-lar in BP and EP. The importance of multivariate analysis for this endeavor cannot be underestimated, since the comparison of overall frequencies across dialects cannot tell us with sufficient clarity or complexity what factors impact variant selection.

Whether this pattern of specifically ADO marking should be considered to be a “true” case of DOM or not may be more a definitional issue than a substantive one. The important point from my perspective is that there is a clearly motivated distribution of the possible ways of encoding ADOs in Portuguese. Even though the formal means for such coding are not like the more familiar ones found in other Romance languages like Spanish or Romanian, which both use prepositional marking, or in other unrelated languages such as Hindi or Turkish, which display more clearly morphological case marking, I would submit that the patterns found in BP and EP, if already known in the literature, have simply not been considered jointly with more classical DOM systems because the Portuguese patterns are limited to anaphoric referents. At the same time, the focus of DOM research has been nearly exclusively on non-anaphoric referents, in essence because DOM in its more recognized form is found with these kinds of referents. If similar phenomena can be found across languages, it may be necessary to distinguish between types of DOM depending on the anaphoric or non-anaphoric nature of the referent (in addition to, e.g., the opposition between DOM and


Scott A. Schwenter

non-DOM marking). For the time being, however, I believe that the data described and analyzed here should indeed be considered an instance of DOM, and that it should be recognized that DOM can be found with both non-anaphoric and/or anaphoric DO referents depending on the language or dialect being examined.

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Two Kinds of Differential Object Marking in Portuguese and Spanish

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