Resumen

RIVAS, Javier  y  BROWN, Esther. Concordancia variable con haber en español puertorriqueño. Boletin de lingüistica [online]. 2012, vol.24, n.37-38, pp.102-118. ISSN 0798-9709.

In Spanish, the impersonal-existential construction with haber (hubo fiestas) is in syntactic variation with the intransitive-existential construction in which haber agrees in person and number with its sole argument (hubieron fiestas). Using a corpus of 370,000 words of spoken Puerto Rican Spanish, we conduct a variable rule analysis on all instances of haber with a plural NP to determine which linguistic factors constrain haber variation in Puerto Rico. Quantitative analyses reveal haber pluralization to be more prevalent (58%) than impersonal haber. Variable rule analyses find two linguistic factors significantly predict haber pluralization; the presence of a human referent in the presentatum (representing prototypical subjects), and the use of haber in the imperfect (with high word frequency and paradigmatically related forms singular~plural).

Palabras clave : regularization; existential verb; Puerto Rican Spanish.

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