Sobre el objeto directo preposicional.

The paper analyses the grammatical trait peculiar to Spanish and other Romance languages consisting in the ateposition of the preposition a to the direct object when this object refers to a person. The study begins with some considerations on transitivity and types of direct object, states that prepositional direct object must have its origin in Latin, since it exists in an ample zone of the Romania, examines possible semantic-functional motivations for its use (disambiguation when subject and object are animated and can therefore act as agents, individualition, or emphasis). Afterwards it presents an extense number of texts with direct object, with and without a; it concludes that in using or omitting the preposition a with direct object the speaker has much freedom to choose one or the other alternative provided there is no abiguity and that the only rule never violated in this respect is that personal pronouns functioning as direct object must be preceded by a ("La veo a ella") [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]