The pluralisation of the impersonal "HABER" in the Spanish of Valencia

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 (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 test. 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'.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 test. 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'.