Tesis doctoral: Claes, Jeroen. 2014. The pluralization of presentational haber in Caribbean Spanish. A study in Cognitive Construction Grammar and Comparative Sociolinguistics. University of Antwerp (Bélgica), Department of Linguistics. Información completa en la web de Infoling: infoling.org/informacion/T135.html In standard Spanish, presentational haber (‘there-to-be’) is an impersonal construction: it only takes the third person singular verb-ending and its nominal argument, e.g. mangos ‘mangoes’ in (1), behaves as a direct object. However, there seems to be a growing tendency to establish verb-agreement with the NP (cf. DAquino-Ruiz, 2008), which is known as the pluralization of haber. From a construction-grammar perspective (cf. Goldberg 1995, 2006), this could indicate that the singular construction () coexists with a pluralized schema (). I hypothesize that in Caribbean Spanish, this alternation constitutes an ongoing linguistic change from below. Additionally, I present the hypothesis that haber pluralization is constrained by three general cognitive factors: markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming. (1) Sí, había mangos (SJ14H22 /SJ1672). ‘Yes there wereSing mangoes.’ (2) En mi época habían unos veinticinco, treinta alumnos por aula (LH01H22/LH17). ‘In my days, there werePlur some twenty, thirty students per classroom.’ To evaluate these hypotheses, I present a variationist analysis. In three recent samples of the varieties of Havana, Santo Domingo, and San Juan, I trace the grammatical and social distribution of the alternation, in order to establish whether and to which extent the variation points to an ongoing linguistic change from below and an alternation involving two variants of the presentational construction with haber that is constrained by these three general cognitive factors. Overall, the results indicate that speakers of Caribbean Spanish pluralize the verb in similar proportions (Havana: 44.6%, N=934/2093; Santo Domingo: 46.7%, N=859/1841; San Juan: 41.4%, N=682/1649). The comparative sociolinguistic analysis (involving mixed-effect logistic regression, conditional inference trees, and random forests) displays little variation when it comes to grammatical constraints: in the three capitals, the pluralization is favored by NPs that refer to typical action-chain heads, the use of the pluralized variant in prior discourse and all verb tenses, minus the present and preterit. The sole difference is that, only in San Juan does the absence of negation support pluralization. By contrast, the associations between haber pluralization and social groups vary more significantly according to the respective speech communities. In Havana, the alternation is linked to lower social class. In Santo Domingo, haber pluralization expresses middle-class membership. In San Juan, finally, the pluralization of haber is associated to female gender. The results also suggest a significant interaction between age and social class, in the sense that younger speakers appear to associate haber pluralization to lower social class, whereas it is a typical feature of middle-class speech among older speakers. For none of the three communities, the data display style-shifting. These results suggest that the pluralization of haber constitutes an advanced change from below (Labov, 2001: 308-309), which is constrained by the three general cognitive factors. References Daquino-Ruiz, Giovana. (2008). El cambio linguistico de haber impersonal. Núcleo, XX (25), 103-124. Goldberg, Adele. (2006). Constructions at work. The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, Adele. (1995). Constructions. A construction-grammar approach to argument-structure. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Labov, William. (2001). Principles of linguistic change. Volume 2: social factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Información completa en la web de Infoling: infoling.org/informacion/T135.html
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 21:55:03 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015