A comparative account of variable number concord in Brazilian Portuguese and Mosquito Coast Spanish
Though widely discussed for Brazilian Portuguese (BP) (Scherre and Naro 2014), number variation in Spanish verb morphology has been the subject of few studies with some notable exceptions: Afro-Bolivian Spanish, Spanish in contact with English, and Dominican Spanish. The objectives of our paper are: (1) to analyze a case of variable subject-verb concord in a variety of Spanish in contact with Miskitu spoken in Nicaragua: Mosquito Coast Spanish (MCS), and (2) discuss the notion of parameter change vastly investigated in BP and how this original data set is comparable to that. The data is oral in nature and was collected from narratives and interviews with speakers of MCS. The results of the regression model confirm that several factors show predictive power, particularly the order of the verb in relation to the subject, phonic saliency of the verb, intervening material between subject/verb, and gender and education level of the speaker.
