La pluralización de haber presentacional en el español peninsular: datos de Twitter [The pluralization of presentational haber in Peninsular Spanish: Data from Twitter]

Authors

  • Jeroen Claes KU Leuven Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.30974

Keywords:

dialectology, cognitive sociolinguistics, twitter research, Pensinsular Spanish, Twitter as corpus, haber pluralization

Abstract

In this paper we explore whether Twitter data can be used in dialectological studies of morphosyntactic alternations in Peninsular Spanish. Specifically, drawing on a corpus of tweets we evaluate the hypothesis that in Peninsular Spanish, as in Caribbean Spanish, the pluralization of presentational haber (e.g., había(n) fiestas ‘there were parties’) is constrained by two domain-general cognitive constraints on language production: markedness of coding and statistical preemption. Then, we analyze the geographic distribution of haber pluralization in Peninsular Spanish. The results show that haber is pluralized in 11% (N= 611/5,500) of the cases. The mixed-effects logistic regression analysis supports that nouns which can easily be imagined as starting points of a series of events, the absence of negation, and verb tenses other than the preterit favor pluralization. To explore the geographic distribution of haber pluralization in Peninsular Spanish, we use a generalized additive mixed model, which generates a line that runs approximately from Lérida in the north of Spain to Almería in the south, crossing Teruel and Albacete. East of that line, the pluralized variant has a higher probability of occurrence, but it is not absent from other areas of the Peninsula. We conclude that (i) haber pluralization in Peninsular Spanish is constrained by domain-general cognitive constraints on language production and that (ii) tweets constitute a viable alternative to spoken language data in dialectological studies of morphosyntactic variation.

Author Biography

  • Jeroen Claes, KU Leuven
    Jeroen Claes holds a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics awarded in 2014 by the University of Antwerp (Belgium) for a dissertation on the pluralization of presentational haber in Caribbean Spanish. He has performed extensive fieldwork in Havana, Santo Domingo, and San Juan, but he also explores publicly available corpora and online Big Data. He has published in leading general linguistics, sociolinguistics, and Hispanic linguistics journals. His current research continues to focus on the variable morphosyntax of (Caribbean) Spanish. Through the study of alternations, he explores the question as to which cognitive, social, and individual factors shape linguistic variation in general. By investigating this question, he attempts to establish whether the analytical tools provided by Cognitive Linguistics allow us to formulate a psychologically adequate theory of the constraints that govern morphosyntactic variation.

References

Bartón, K. (2016) MuMIn: Model selection and model averaging based on information criteria (AICc and alike). Consultado en mayo del 2016 en: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MuMIn/index.html.

Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B. y Walker, S. (2016) lme4: Linear Mixed-Effects Models using 'Eigen' and S4. Consultado en mayo del 2016 en: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/index.html.

Bello, A. (1860) Gramática de la lengua castellana al uso de los americanos. Bogotá: Echeverría Hermanos.

Blas-Arroyo, J. L. (1995) A propósito de un caso de convergencia gramatical por causación múltiple en el área de in?uencia lingüística catalana. Análisis socio­lingüístico. Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica 21–22: 175–200.

Blas-Arroyo, J. L. (2016) Entre la estabilidad y la hipercorrección en un antiguo ‘cambio desde abajo’: haber existencial en las comunidades de habla castellonenses. Lingüística Española Actual6: 69–108.

Brown, E. K. (2015) On the utility of combining production data and perceptual data to investigate regional linguistic variation: The case of Spanish experiential gustar ‘to like, to please’ on Twitter and in an online survey. Journal of Linguistic Geography 3(2): 47–59. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/jlg.2016.1.

Burnham, K. P. y Anderson, D. R. (2002) Model selection and multimodel inference. New York, NY: Springer.

Castillo-Trelles, C. (2007) La pluralización del verbo haber impersonal en el español yucateco. In J. Holmquist, A. Lorenzino y L. Sayahi (eds) Selected Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics 74–84. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Claes, J. (2014a) A cognitive construction grammar approach to the pluralization of presentational haber in Puerto Rican Spanish. Language Variation and Change 26(2): 219–246. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394514000052.

Claes, J. (2014b) La pluralización de haber presentacional y su distribución social en el español de La Habana, Cuba. Un acercamiento desde la gramática de construcciones. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 23: 165–187.

Claes, J. (2014c) Sociolingüística comparada y gramática de construcciones: un acercamiento a la pluralización de haber en las capitales antillanas. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 27(2): 338–364.

Claes, J. (2014d) The pluralization of presentational haber in Caribbean Spanish. A study in cognitive construction grammar and comparative sociolinguistics. Tesis doctoral inédita. Amberes: Universidad de Amberes.

Claes, J. (2015) Competing constructions: The pluralization of presentational haber in Dominican Spanish. Cognitive Linguistics 26(1): 1–30. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2014-0006.

Claes, J. (2016) Cognitive, social, and individual constraints on linguistic variation: A case study of presentational haber pluralization in Caribbean Spanish. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Claes, J. (en prensa) Cognitive and geographic constraints on morphosyntactic variation: The variable agreement of presentational haber in Peninsular Spanish. Belgian Journal of Linguistics.

D’Aquino-Ruiz, G. (2004) Haber impersonal en el habla de Caracas. Análisis sociolingüístico. Boletín de Lingüística 21(1): 3–26.

Davies, M. (2002-) Corpus del español. 100 million words (1200s-1900s). Consultado en mayo de 2016 en: http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/

DeMello, G. (1991) Pluralización del verbo haber impersonal en el español hablado culto de once ciudades. Thesaurus 46(3): 445–471.

Díaz-Campos, M. (2003) The pluralization of haber in Venezuelan Spanish: A sociolinguistic change in real time. IU Working Papers in Linguistics 3: 1–13.

Freites-Barros, F. (2008) Ma?s sobre la pluralización de haber impersonal en Venezuela: el estado Táchira. Lingua Americana 22: 36–57.

Gentry, J. (2016) twitteR: R Based Twitter Client. Consultado en mayo de 2016 en: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/twitteR/index.html

Goldberg, A. E. (1995) Constructions: A Construction Grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Goldberg, A. E. (2006) Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gómez-Molina, J.-R. (2013) Pluralización de haber impersonal en el español de Valencia (España). Verba 40: 253–284.

Gonçalves, B. y Sánchez, D. (2014) Crowdsourcing dialect characterization through Twitter. Plos One 9. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0112074.

Haddican, B. y Johnson, D. E. (2012) Effects on the particle verb alternation across English dialects. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18(2): artículo 5.

Holmquist, J. (2008) Gender in context: Features and factors in men’s and women’s speech in rural Puerto Rico. In M. Westmoreland y J. A. Thomas (eds) Selected proceedings of the 4th workshop on Spanish sociolinguistics 17–35. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Hosmer, D. W. y Lemeshow, S. (2000) Applied logistic regression. Oxford: Wiley. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/0471722146.

Huang, Y., Guo, D., Kasakoff, A. y Grieve, J. (2016) Understanding U.S. regional linguistic variation with Twitter data analysis. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 59: 244–255 .

Kahle, D. y Wickman, H. (2016) ggmap: Spatial Visualization with ggplot2. Consultado en mayo de 2016 en: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggmap/index.html

Kany, C. E. (1951) Sintaxis hispanoamericana. Madrid: Gredos.

Keenan, E. (1976) Towards a universal de?nition of subject. In C. N. Li (ed.) Subject and topic 305–333. New York, NY: Academic Press.

Labov, W. (1972) Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Langacker, R. W. (1987) Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume 1: Theoretical prequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, R. W. (1991) Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume 2: Descriptive application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Lastra, Y. y Martín-Butragueño, P. (2016) La concordancia de haber existencial en la Ciudad de Me?xico. Boletín de ?lología 51: 121–145. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-93032016000200005.

Llorente, A. M. (1980) Consideraciones sobre el español actual. Anuario de Letras 18: 5–61.

Montes-Giraldo, J. J. (1982) Sobre el sintagma haber + sustantivo. Thesaurus 37: 383–385.

Myachykov, A. y Tomlin, R. S. (2015) Attention and salience. In E. D?browska y D. Divjak (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics 31–52. Berlin and New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.

Nakagawa, S. y Schielzeth, H. (2013) A general and simple method for obtaining R2 from generalized linear mixed-effects models. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 4(2): 133–142. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-210x.2012.00261.x.

Pato, E. (2016) La pluralización de haber en español peninsular. In C. De Benito-Moreno y Á. Octavio de Toledo (eds) En torno a haber: construcciones, usos y variación desde el latín hasta la actualidad 357–391. Berlin: Peter Lang.

Pérez-Martín, A. M. (2007) Pluralización del verbo haber en el habla de la isla de El Hierro: datos cuantitativos. Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna 25(2): 505–513.

Prince, E. (1992). The ZPG letter: Subjects, de?niteness, and information-status. In W. C. Mann, y S. A. Thompson (eds) Discourse description: Diverse linguistic analyses of a fund-raising text 295–326. Amsterdamn and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Quilis, A. (1983) La concordancia gramatical en la lengua española hablada en Madrid. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientí?cas.

R Core Team (2016) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Consultado en enero de 2016 en: https://www.R-project.org/.

Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. (2009) Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.

Ruíz-Tinoco, A. (2012) Twitter como corpus para estudios de geolingüística del español. Sophia Linguistica: Working Papers in Linguistics 60: 147–163.

Salgado, H. y Bouzouita, M. (en prensa) El uso de las construcciones de adverbio locativo con pronombre posesivo en el español peninsular: un primer acercamiento diatópico. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie.

Samper-Padilla, J. A. y Hernández-Cabrera, C. E. (2012) En torno a los usos personales de haber en el español de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. En T. E. Jiménez-Juliá, B. López-Meirama, V. Vázquez-Rozas, A. Veiga-Rodríguez y G. Rojo-Sánchez (eds)Cum corde et in nova grammatical: Estudios ofrecidos a Guillermo Rojo 743–754.Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela.

Schmid, H.-J. y Küchenhoff, H. (2013) Collostructional analysis and other ways of measuring lexicogrammatical attraction: Theoretical premises, practical problems and cognitive underpinnings. Cognitive Linguistics 24(3): 531–577. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2013-0018.

Tagliamonte, S. y Baayen, H. R. (2012) Models, forests and trees of York English: Was/were variation as a case study for statistical practice. Language Variation and Change 24(1): 135–178. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394512000129.

Toutanova, K., Klein, D., Manning, C. D. y Singer, Y. (2003) Feature-rich part-of-speech tagging with a cyclic dependency network. Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics – Human Language Technologies 252–259. Chicago, IL: North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Doi: https://doi.org/10.3115/1073445.1073478.

Wieling, M., Montemagni, S., Nerbonne, J. y Baayen, R. H. (2014) Lexical differences between Tuscan dialects and standard Italian: Accounting for geographic and socio-demographic variation using generalized additive mixed modeling. Language 90(3): 669–692. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2014.0064.

Wood, S. N. (2016) mgcv: Mixed GAM Computation Vehicle with GCV/AIC/REML Smoothness Estimation. Consultado en mayo de 2016 de: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/mgcv/index.html.

Published

2017-08-14

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Claes, J. (2017). La pluralización de haber presentacional en el español peninsular: datos de Twitter [The pluralization of presentational haber in Peninsular Spanish: Data from Twitter]. Sociolinguistic Studies, 11(1), 41-64. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.30974