Differential object marking / dom is the term for the phenomenon of distinguishing two classes of direct objects, one bearing a special marker, while the other lacking it. In modern linguistics, the marker licensing is partially or fully attributed to the features of a direct object: Animacy/Inanimacy and referential status. Russian didactic literature generally contains a reduced explanatory model of Spanish dom, based on the grammar of the Royal Spanish Academy. For Catalan, the explanatory model is complicated by the usus/norm split, the latter reducing the phenomenon’s scope. The paper focuses on the improvement of dom explanatory models for Spanish and Catalan.