The pluralization of presentational haber in Caribbean Spanish: A study in Cognitive Construction Grammar and Comparative Sociolinguistics

• Main Author: Claes, Jeron
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2014
• Subjects: Argument structure; Cognition; Comprehension; Construction grammar; Dialects; Grammatical number; Inference; Language; Language change; Linguistics; Markedness; Modern language; Negation; Priming; Social classes; Social factors; Sociolinguistics; Spanish language; Syntactic structures; Tense; Theoretical linguistics; Verbs; United States > US; Chicago Illinois
• ISBN: 1321923686; 9781321923681

In this dissertation, I investigate the pluralization of presentational haber (e.g. Habian fiestas. `There were parties.') in the Spanish of Havana, Santo Domingo and San Juan. Drawing on Goldberg's (1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: Chicago University Press.) Cognitive Construction Grammar, I claim that the phenomenon consists in a language change from below: the pluralized variant of the presentational haber construction ( haber Subject>) is replacing the singular variant(<AdvP haber Object>). Using a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, I show that speakers of the three Caribbean dialects pluralize the verb in 41-46% of the cases. The linguistic factors that were investigated in this study (typical action-chain position of the noun's referent, absence/presence of negation, verb tense, comprehension-to-production priming, and production-to-production priming) argue in favor of considering the variation as an argument-structure alternation. The comparative sociolinguistic analyses reveal that these factors have the same effect and relative strengths in the three varieties. Conditional inference trees show that the linguistic factors also display a similar pattern of interaction in Havana, Santo Domingo, and San Juan. This suggests that the variation is constrained by three general cognitive constraints on linguistic expression, namely, markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming. Haber pluralization also covaries with social factors. The results for gender and social class support that the phenomenon constitutes an advanced change from below. These results support the main hypothesis. These results illustrate that, with cognitive-linguistic theory, variationists can construct more adequate statistical models of linguistic alternations and derive stronger generalizations from them.