Prototipicidad de sujetos en la variación dialectal del verbo ‘haber’

Abstract

The alternation of the verb haber as a personal or impersonal form appears in all Spanish variants ('Hubieron' problemas / 'había' personas). While prescriptivists argue that haber belongs to impersonal constructions and must be conjugated in singular form, manifold investigations show its pluralization (DeMello, 1991;Gómez Molina, 2013). For that purpose, an analysis of the haber pluralization in both Mexican and Cuban Spanish is presented from the obtained data in two sociolinguistic corpora. The investigation's aim is to analyze linguistic and extralinguistic factors that modify the haber conjugations when it co-occurs with a collective plural or singular noun phrase to determine the use patterns in both dialects, and to delimit its social stratification as well as to verify if pluralization increases when NP co-occurs with a verb which shows features of a prototypical subject. In La Habana pluralization reached 47.2% while in Ciudad de Mexico only 8.6%. The factors that resulted statistically significant were the NP's collectivity which disfavors pluralization and the animacy that favors it. Moreover, in Ciudad de Mexico the education level and age proved to be significant. Due to the pluralization frequency among youth and adults, as well as its greater use among those with a low-level education, it could be interpreted as a change in progress that encourages the displacement of the accusative construction ('haber + OD') to an intransitive one which conceptualizes the noun as the subject of the sentence.

Ahí se apuesta la vida. The emergence of impersonal interpretations in Spanish*

“…Quantification and predications are well‐known agreement problems ( La mayoría de los muchachos… tratan de venirse a Caracas ‘Most of the boys… try to come to Caracas’, Su preocupación son sus hijos ‘His concern are/is his children’ (Soler, 2014). Impersonal haber is also a classic problem ( Había(n) muchos problemas ‘There were a lot of problems’) (DeMello 1991, Lastra & Martín Butragueño 2016, Arteaga Santos & de la Mora Gutiérrez 2022).…”

Existential Constructions, Definiteness Effects, and Linguistic Contact: At the Crossroads between Spanish and Catalan

“…The alternative hypothesis has also been put forth that the pivot of existential haber, 'to be', occupies the subject position of an intransitive construction. It comes as no surprise that this approach has revolved around plural agreement between the pivot and the verb (e.g., Montes Giraldo 1982;Fontanella de Weinberg 1992;Nicita 1997;Martínez 1999;Castillo Lluch and Octavio de Toledo y Huerta 2016;Claes 2014Claes , 2016Arteaga and de la Mora 2022).…”