Entre la estabilidad y la hipercorrección en un antiguo ‘cambio desde abajo’: Haber existencial en las comunidades de habla castellonenses

Taken from the Sociolinguistic macro-corpus of Castellon and its regions (MCSCS), the data of this variationist study confirm that the pluralization between presentational haber and the noun preceding or following it, has a remarkable extension in speech communities of the Catalan linguistic dominium. This fact explains the lesser relevance of linguistic factors in explaining the variation, despite the fact that some of them are still significant. Yet, more relevant are several socio-stylistic factors, which point to changes in the social characterization of the phenomenon at the present stage of language. A first important finding is that the vernacular form appears to have been stabilized in broad sectors of society, especially in the most spontaneous registers. However, the regression analysis also finds some groups who are significantly below in the realization of the concordance. These pressures are even greater at the intersection of these groups and the main language of the speakers, where some patterns of hypercorrection are observed. These latter mainly affect certain subgroups among the Valencian-speaking people, in which the normative conflict seems to arise more radically, given that the vernacular trait is also very common in their primary language, Catalan.