Evolution of differential object marking in Macedonian dialects

By the late Middle Ages, a part of South Slavic, including Macedonian and Bulgarian, had lost nominal case inflection, leading to the disappearance of the old Slavic differential object marking (DOM) system. In the 19th century, some southern Macedonian dialects developed a new DOM system based on the preposition na ‘on, to’. This study explores the evolution of this DOM system by comparing Southern Macedonian texts from two periods — the mid-19th century and mid-20th century. The main factors conditioning DOM include animacy (humanness), definiteness, and the lexical class of the verb. We observe a general increase in the na-marking and a shift from optionality toward automatization. In early texts, the na-marking sporadically occurs with pronouns and definite human-referring nouns. In later texts, pronouns and human proper names are almost always marked, whereas marking of definite human-referring common nouns remains optional, albeit with increasing frequency over time. We also report negative evidence for other factors frequently mentioned in typological works on DOM, such as the disambiguating function of case within the global discourse context. Notably, this factor does not emerge as significant in Macedonian.