%0 Journal Article %T La ausencia de marcaci¨®n de caso en los objetos directos con referente humano en posici¨®n inicial %A Sanz %A Blanca %J Revista signos %D 2011 %I Scientific Electronic Library Online %R 10.4067/S0718-09342011000200006 %X the direct object with human reference is marked with the preposition a. however, when the direct object is located in initial position it usually tends to lose the case mark, even though the referent is human and individual, as it is illustrated in the following example: ella la recomend¨® un cu£¿ado m¨ªo. the aim of this article is to determine the syntactic factors involved in the absence of case marking. the methodology of this work is based on the data from four corpora of the spanish spoken in mexico. the results of the investigation show that direct objects with human reference without the presence of case mark have certain subject sentence features given their proximity to the topicality and individuation hierarchies. %K differential object marking %K left dislocation %K topicality and individuation hierarchies. %U http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_abstract&pid=S0718-09342011000200006&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en