Differential Object Marking in Heritage and Homeland Italian

We examine variable patterns of use of differential object marking (DOM) in conversational Italian recorded in Toronto, Canada, and Calabria, Italy. An exhaustive sample of 366 direct objects, produced by Homeland and three generations of Heritage speakers, shows retention of the DOM system. Successive generations have lower rates of DOM, but this is because they don’t produce enough tokens of certain syntactic and semantic types (e.g., left-dislocated or indefinite pronouns). Thus, they have less opportunity to use DOM: token distributions account for their lower rates. In contexts with sufficient tokens, significant contrasts emerge, indicating that all generations retain the conditioning of relevant factors (Definiteness, Referent of Object, Verb Type, Dislocation). No effects of social network or linguistic practices emerged.