Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 204
Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)
'Había' or 'habían' dos niños en el parque? The pluralization of presentational ‘haber’ in Puerto Rican Spanish
Authors: Claes, Jeroen
Submitted by: Claes, Jeroen (Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium)
In normative Spanish, presentational haber is used as an impersonal, subjectless verb, and, therefore, it shows default third-person singular verb-agreement, as is exemplified by (1a).
(1) a. Había dos niños en el parque.
b. Habían dos niños en el parque.
‘There were two children in the park.’
However, in many varieties optional number-agreement is observed (example [1b]), which is known as the ‘pluralization of haber’.
In my presentation, I will investigate this phenomenon in a recent sample of Puerto Rican Spanish, focusing upon two research questions:
- What is the (socio)linguistic distribution of the pluralization of presentational haber in the Spanish of San Juan, Puerto Rico?
- How can these distributions be explained in a psychologically and sociolinguistically adequate manner?
In order to answer these interrogatives, in the first part, I will focalize on the way the variation and the (extra)linguistic constraints it is subject to can be modeled in Goldberg’s (1995; 2006) Cognitive Construction Grammar. At this regard, my main hypothesis contends that the phenomenon corresponds to an ongoing language change from below that consists in the substitution of the canonical argument-structure construction, in which the NP functions as a direct object (e.g. [1a]), by an innovative schema – identical in meaning, but different in sociolinguistic and stylistic significance –, in which the NP functions as a subject, (e.g. [1b]). In the second part, I will present indirect quantitative support for this conjecture, testing corollary hypotheses derived from central assumptions of variationist and/or cognitive linguistics. More precisely, taking into account the main hypothesis and Langacker’s (1991: 298) notion of ‘markedness of coding’, I expect to find more cases of pluralized haber when the concept coded by the NP approaches an archetypical subject (Factor groups: Information-status [Prince 1992], Empathy scale, Definiteness/specificity scale [Langacker 1991]). In addition, since the repeated witnessing of a form in a single construction disfavors its use in other patterns (Goldberg 2006: 94-102), the innovative argument-structure will be more frequent with verb-forms that appear in a variety of constructions (Factor group: Distribution of the verb-form across constructions). Finally, if the main hypothesis is on the right track, the data will display social co-variation and style shifting patterns characteristic of ongoing changes from below (Labov 2001) (Factor groups: gender, age, educational achievement, social prestige and speech style). In the final part, I will evaluate how the results portray the main hypothesis.
REFERENCES
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.
Langacker, Ronald. (1991). Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume 2: descriptive application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Prince, Ellen. (1992). The ZPG Letter: Subjects, definiteness, and information-status. In William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson, Discourse description. Diverse linguistic analyses of a fund-raising text (295-326). New York: John Benjamin’s.