Discourse topic and differential object marking in Zenzontepec Chatino
Year: 2026
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a pattern in which some grammatical objects in a language bear special marking, while others do not. Well known cases involve a range of often interacting factors: inherent properties of objects, such as animacy or person; (pro)nominality; and/or contextual properties, such as definiteness or specificity. Recent work has shed light on the role that information structure, especially topicality, plays in DOM ( Dalrymple and Nilolaeva 2011 ; Iemmolo 2010 ), but so far this line of inquiry has concentrated on topicality at the level of the proposition ( Lambrecht 1994 ). Zenzontepec Chatino (Otomanguean, Mexico) has been argued to display DOM in which objects are marked if they are (secondary) topic ( Dalrymple and Nilolaeva 2011 ). A larger and more naturalistic corpus of language use reveals that discourse topic ( Givón 1983 ), and not sentence topic, is the principal determinant of DOM in Zenzontepec Chatino. These findings broaden our view and expand our toolkit for understanding this common and intriguing, if sometimes confounding, linguistic phenomenon.
Source: Typological studies in language
Author: Eric W. Campbell
Institution: University of California, Santa Barbara
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7160495205