La transparencia de la pluralidad. Notas sobre la concordancia semántica de gente en el español rural europeo

Agreement phenomena are included in the feature catalogue of vernacular universals. Lexical plural gente (‘people’) triggers non canonical semantic agreement in rural European Spanish. Although further research is needed, the present study yields some tentative findings. The non-standard nature of semantic agreement, the incidental influence of linguistic constraints on it and its blurred geographical distribution are confirmed. The article advances the hypothesis that plural morphology provides a way to overtly express the distributive interpretation of predicates over individuals and posits externalization of plurality as a vernacular tendency of Spanish. Data are extracted from the Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural.