Cognitive, Social, and Individual Constraints on Linguistic Variation: A Case Study of Presentational 'Haber' Pluralization in Caribbean Spanish

by Jeroen Claes

Overview

The present volume tries to answer the question: What constrains morphosyntactic variation? By analyzing the variable agreement of presentational haber (‘there to be’) in Caribbean Spanish with advanced statistical tools and theoretical constructs of Cognitive Sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and variationist sociolinguistics, it proposes an innovative theoretical model of the constraints that govern morphosyntactic variation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110521627
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	12/19/2016
Series:	Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR] , #60
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jeroen Claes, Katholieke Universityeit Leuven, Belgium.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 3

Part A Preliminaries

2 Presentational haber pluralization 13

2.1 Earlier studies in (perceptual) dialectology 13

2.2 Earlier studies in variationist sociolinguistics 17

2.3 Summary 27

3 Cognitive Construction Grammar and language variation 31

3.1 Cognitive Construction Grammar 31

3.2 Cognitive Construction Grammar and language variation 37

3.3 Summary 45

4 Research questions and hypotheses 49

4.1 Research questions 49

4.2 Hypotheses 50

4.3 Summary 57

5 Methodology 61

5.1 Judgment sample, selection criteria, and stratification variables 61

5.2 Fieldwork methods 66

5.3 Transcription, selection of cases, and envelope of variation 72

5.4 Statistical toolkit 76

5.5 Comparative sociolinguistics 83

5.6 Summary 85

6 Semantic and syntactic properties of presentational haber 89

6.1 The meaning of the presentational haber constructions: Pointing-Out 89

6.2 The nominal argument 90

6.3 The adverbial phrase 110

6.4 Implicit nominal arguments and adverbial phrases 114

6.5 Summary and box diagrams 115

Part B Cognitive, social, and individual constraints on presentational hater pluralization

7 Cognitive constraints on presentational haber pluralization 121

7.1 Structure of the corpus and the regression models 121

7.2 Markedness of coding 129

7.3 Statistical preemption 133

7.4 Structural priming 142

7.5 Interaction between the linguistic predictors 145

7.6 Relative importance of the linguistic predictors 157

7.7 Summary 158

8 Social constraints on presentational haber pluralization 163

8.1 Social constraints: Age, education, and gender 163

8.2 Linguistic predictors across social groups 169

8.3 Relative importance of the linguistic predictors across social groups 176

8.4 Summary 180

9 Individual constraints on presentational haber pluralization 183

9.1 Distribution across individuals 183

9.2 Random intercepts, slopes, and participant-specific regression coefficients 190

9.3 Linguistic predictors across individuals 197

9.4 The behavior of the Havana university graduates 203

9.5 Summary 207

10 Cognitive, social, and individual constraints on presentational haber pluralization 211

10.1 Cognitive constraints 211

10.2 Social constraints 213

10.3 Individual constraints 214

10.4 Conclusion 215

References 219

Index 233

Appendix A Story-reading task 237

Appendix B Questionnaire-reading task 239