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In:Topicality and the Shaping of Grammar: New perspectives from lesser-studied languages
Edited by Enrique L. Palancar, Claudine Chamoreau and Anaïd Donabédian
[Typological Studies in Language 137] 2026
► pp. 169–187

Chapter 5
Discourse topic and differential object marking in Zenzontepec Chatino

 | University of California, Santa Barbara
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Language background and the data used for this study
  • 3.Basic syntax and grammatical objects
  • 4.DOM in Zenzontepec Chatino
    • 4.1Animacy
    • 4.2Definiteness (identifiability)
    • 4.3Specificity
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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