Resumen

RUIZ SANCHEZ, Carmen. Restricciones funcionales en la elisión del Marcador de Plural en el Español de Caracas. Boletin de Linguistica [online]. 2005, vol.17, n.23, pp.89-105. ISSN 0798-9709.

This work analyzes and explains the functional factors constraining the deletion of plural /-s/ in Caracas Spanish. Regarding the codification and analysis of the data, the study follows Poplack’s approach (1980) with the aim of demonstrating that the deletion of the plural marker depends on the complex combination of morphological, semantic and syntactic factors, supporting a new interpretation of Kiparsky’s Functional Hypothesis (1972), in which the importance of contextual elements is taken into account. The results show a tendency to retain /-s/ in the first element of the NP and in the NPs in which the only indication of plurality is the phonetic realization of the plural morpheme, and to delete it when there is additional information of plurality in the sentence. It is also argued that a more general functional approach can explain the behavior of plural /-s/ in a more consistent and clear manner than a purely functionalist one at the NP level or than one based on the effect of parallelism in the NP (Pereira Scherre 2001).

Palabras clave : deletion; final /-s/,; functional factors.