Double plural in Dominican Spanish

What is it about?

In Dominican Spanish, speakers produce the marker -(e)se to turn singulars arroz and gallina into the plurals arrócese and gallínase. In a previous research, I proposed that a pure morphological analysis was not sufficient to account for its distribution. The idea was that pragmatic factors guided speakers in selecting specific grammatical contexts to insert the so-called double above instead of using the regular plural marker -(e)s. In this paper I claim that the ‘double plural’ does not exist, and that the plural marker -e but not -s, signals plural formation. More importantly, and based on the Expressive Morphology hypothesis, this article proposes that -se is an enhancing morphological marker used under some restricted morpho-phonological conditions.

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Why is it important?

The article questions the hypothesis that there exists a double plural marker in Dominican Spanish, the -e appended to nouns ending in consonants, and a second one that attaches to all nouns and adjectives, represented by -se, under some pragmatic conditions of focus. Instead I demonstrate that there is a single plural marker, -e, and a zero plural markers that attaches to vowel-ending non-verbs. It is further demonstrated that the occurrence of -se is indeed an enhancing mechanism that Dominican speakers use for all lexical categories, including adverbs, which never inflect for plurality, as in la mayoría viven abájose "most (people) live DOWN THERE", where -se attaches to the adverb abajo. Some of the enhancing properties discussed refer to pragmatic effects, promiscuity in regard to input category, alternative outputs, interspeaker variations, special syntax, among others which were first proposed by Arnold Zwicky.

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