Interaction among cognitive constraints: The case of the pluralization of presentational haber in Puerto Rican Spanish

Earlier work on the pluralization of presentational haber (e.g., había/habían fiestas ‘there were parties’) in Puerto Rican Spanish (Claes, 2014) has established that the phenomenon constitutes an ongoing argument-structure change from below that is conditioned by three domain-general cognitive constraints (markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming). In this paper I briefly introduce these constraints and the way they condition haber pluralization. Then, I use a conditional inference tree to investigate if and to what extent they interact. Using the conditional permutation of factors in a random forest model of the variation, I also determine the relative strengths of the cognitive constraints. Statistical preemption emerges as the most potent constraint from both procedures. Particularly, the results suggest that this factor incites speakers to stick to the usage patterns they have observed, whereas markedness of coding and structural priming encourage speakers to extend the pluralized presentational haber construction to more and new conceptualizations. This reminds of the roles these cognitive factors fulfill in language acquisition and innovationstatus: publishe