Differential object marking in Italian: Evidence from two Italian heritage communities

We compare patterns of use of Differential Object Marking in conversational regional Italian, combining variationist sociolinguistic and language contact approaches to examine variation and change in Heritage Italian. We compare four communities to query the role of the context of residence and the generation (since immigration) in this variable: Campanians in Italy and in Bedford, UK, and Calabrians in Italy and in Toronto, Canada. The Bedford community is more insular than the Toronto group. Given expected ensuing differences in the amount of Italian input to each group of heritage speakers, as well as their rate of use of the language, we hypothesized that there would be more change in the heritage variety spoken in Canada than in the UK. Data was collected in the four communities following the standard sociolinguistic interview protocol (cf. Labov 1984) and analyzed in the comparative variationist framework. This analysis compares patterns of variation (a + Object vs bare Object) in samples of spontaneous conversations across the groups (n=509) using Mixed Effects Models. All generations retain conditioning of three factors (Object Referent, Verb Type, Dislocation) in animate object contexts and rarely overextended the marker to inanimate object contexts. The Campanian group (Homeland and Heritage) has a higher rate of DO-marking than the Calabrian group. However, Generation is not a predictor of the rate of Differential Object Marking use in either community. Therefore, we lack evidence that the amount of input, as well as the frequency of language use, influence the rate of change for this morphosyntactic variable