La conceptualización del núcleo en las construcciones (pseudo)partitivas: la concordancia sujeto-verbo

The aim of this work is to analyze the influence of semantic-pragmatic factors in the establishment of Spanish subject-verb agreement in those cases in which the nominal that functions as a subject is manifested through a (pseudo)partitive construction, formed by a singular nucleus + plural prepositional phrase (un grupo de neurocientíficos han decidido acabar con los interrogantes del experimento / un grupo de chicos se acercó a mí y comenzaron a golpearme). The Royal Spanish Academy defines agreement as the “formal expression of various syntactic relationships” (NGLE, 2009: 13). It states that this relationship arises from the morphological agreement between two lexical units that are in specific positions. The agreement, then, is understood, from a syntactic position, as the reiteration of inflectional information in various places in the chain. However, from cognitive linguistics, the establishment of agreement is about a conceptual superposition, a common characteristic of grammatical constructions, whereby the same information is symbolized in multiple places” (Langacker, 2008, p. 347). Based on the notions of figure and ground proposed by Langacker (1991 and 2008), our hypothesis argues that the agreement between the subject and the verb is defined, in the cases analyzed, according to the conceptualization of the nominal and which is the element that the speaker brings into focus during the construction of his speech.