The present work is a diachronic study of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish which focuses on the early stages of the grammaticalization process undergone by the a -marker. Following Pensado (1995), I relate DOM a to the topicalizing function of Latin ad ‘with regard to, as to’, and then proceed to examine the step-by-step expansion of the grammaticalizing item, leading from personal pronouns to proper names and from these to definite common nouns of human reference. The central aim of the paper is to shed light on the specific properties associated with the distinct subsets of direct objects which were reached by DOM, under the assumption that these properties served to mediate shifts between categories and facilitated the development of a system governed by the semantic dimensions of animacy and definiteness, whose origins were tied to a parameter of information structure.
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