Pluralización de "haber" impersonal en el español de Valencia (España)

Abstract

The selection of singular/plural forms for the impersonal verb haber is one of the most interesting phenomena of spoken Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic. These alternative forms correspond to the standard/non-standard uses respectively according to the Spanish academic norm. This paper reports the findings from the research carried out within the bilingual community Catalan-Spanish of Valencia (Spain), which focuses on identifying those linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that encourage the syntactic variation in the use of singular/plural forms when the verb haber is accompanied by the Noun phrase in the plural. The sociolinguistic analysis is based on a corpus made up of semi-structured interviews and acceptability tests. Independent variables selected to explain the dependent variable (singular/plural) belong to the following categories: ten are linguistic, three stylistic and four are sociological. Results from the statistical analysis indicate that the use of the non-canonical plural form is 46.2%. The results also provide explanations for the incidence of different factors, such as age and socio-cultural status, in the alternation of the use of singular or plural. Moreover, the level of acceptability of pluralisation is well over 39.0%, in some of the internal linguistic variables, such as ‘semantic feature of the Noun phrase’, ‘lexical form of the Noun phrase’, ‘position of the Noun phrase’ and ‘verbal tense’.