A Cognitive Construction Grammar approach to the pluralization of presentational haber in Puerto Rican Spanish

Abstract

In this paper, I present an analysis of the pluralization of haber ‘there is/are’ in Puerto Rican Spanish (e.g., habían fiestas ‘there were parties’) as an ongoing language change from below in which the impersonal argument-structure construction (<AdvPhaberObj>) is being replaced by a personal variant (<AdvPhaberSubj>). Speakers pluralize presentational haber in about 41% of the cases, and linguistic conditioning factors are ‘typical action chain-position of the noun's referent,’ polarity of the clause, verb tense, comprehension-to-production priming, and production-to-production priming. I argue that the effect of these independent variables can be traced back to three cognitive factors: the preference for unmarked coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming. Social distributions can also be modeled in constructionist frameworks, with results for social class, formality, and gender advocating in favor of considering this variation as an ongoing change from below, which allows speakers to position themselves in terms of gender and social class.

Competing constructions: The pluralization of presentational haber in Dominican Spanish

“…For age, this result was already anticipated in the discussion of the hypotheses, because earlier investigations (Claes 2014;D'Aquino-Ruiz 2008;Fontanella de Weinberg 1992b: 44) have shown the pluralization of haber to be a slowly advancing process, which may be invisible in apparent time. By the same token, hypothesis 7 already anticipates that the alternations between the two constructions may not display any style shifting.…”

“…'But on a, on a whole, eh, there are SG characteristics that one has to recognize that they are worth it, which this particular sector has.' However, in my study of haber pluralization in Puerto Rican Spanish (Claes 2014), I have shown that all of these results can be subsumed under the term 'typical action-chain position'. Indeed, In contrast, Table 3 shows that nouns that refer to more typical endpoints of the action chain (i.e., typical patients, exemplified in 17-18) or to typical settings of events (e.g., aeropuertos 'airports' in example 19) are more common with singular haber, as is shown by the negative log odds values.…”

“…As argued in Claes (2014), both variants encode the POINTING-OUT idealized cognitive model proposed by Lakoff:…”

“…(17) Nosotros salíamos a pasear por los parques, a los parques así como esto, antes habían columpios, habían cosas de cre, recreación, sí (SD01H21/ RD62 Finally, Claes (2014) reports that Puerto Ricans tend to use the singular variant more often with presentational haber expressions involving negation. However, Rbrul detects no such effect in Dominican Spanish.…”

“…In a recent article (Claes 2014), I have argued against the background of Cognitive Construction Grammar (e.g., Goldberg 1995Goldberg , 2006CCxG, henceforth) that, in Puerto Rican Spanish, the pluralization of haber amounts to a language change 'from below' 2 during which the argument-structure construction <AdvP haber Subj> is replacing <AdvP haber Obj> under the influence of three general cognitive factors (markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming). With this paper, I wish to evaluate whether these results are also obtained in Dominican Spanish, as this would greatly fortify the claim that general cognitive constraints, rather than specific contextual features, constrain the alternation between singular and pluralized presentational haber.…”