Cognitive, social, and individual constraints on linguistic variation: A case study of presentational haber pluralization in Caribbean Spanish

At the heart of "Cognitive, social, and individual constraints on linguistic variation" stands a central question that concerns both cognitive and variationist approaches to language, namely, what constrains morphosyntactic variation? To answer this question, this monograph combines methodological and theoretical constructs from Cognitive Sociolinguistics (in particular, Cognitive Construction Grammar; Goldberg, 1995, 2006), psycholinguistics, and variationist sociolinguistics into a innovative theoretical model of the constraints that govern morphosyntactic variation. The model consists of three types of constraints: cognitive, social, and individual. The first of these types is related to the way language is represented mentally and how these representations are accessed and retrieved during language production. The second type refers to the fact that while producing language, speakers are not only concerned with expressing ideas, but also with positioning themselves in the social landscape as members of particular geographic and social groups. Of course, any speaker of any language has his or her own idiosyncracies, which cannot be reduced to the other two types of constraints, but rather reflect individuals’ attitudes, cognitive capacities, or social histories. This is what is intended with the third type of constraints. To test this hypothesis, the volume draws on a case study in Caribbean Spanish of the variable agreement manifested by the existential/presentational 'haber' construction, the Spanish analog of English 'there is/there are'.nrpages: 244status: publishe