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.