VARIACIóN EN LA MARCACIóN DIFERENCIADA DE OBJETO EN ESPA？OL

concerning the differential object marking in spanish various explanations have been given. these are generalizations based on semantic, syntactic or pragmatic aspects. however, in case studies it is possible to find examples with or without a mark, which do not correspond to the general trends. in other words, there is not a categorical explanation for stating when a direct object must be marked with a ('to'). this paper presents a grammatical variation study whose objective is to establish what semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic features show the tendency for a direct object to be marked with a. in this way, we distinguish, within a set of features, which are more important than others. the corpus for this case study has been taken from mexican spontaneous speech. although there are now many papers aiming to give a convincing explanation of this phenomenon, none of them does so from a variationist perspective.