Despite the fact that the verb haber is an impersonal verb when followed by a noun phrase (NP) in the form of a direct object (DO), with which it does not agree in normative Spanish, its pluralised uses (habían/han habido/hubieron muchos niños en el patio) are increasingly common in different varieties of the Spanish language, both in America and Spain ( RAE and ASALE, 2009 : 3063). The alternation of both cases of agreement and cases of disagreement is common in European Spanish as many speakers treat the NP that follows as a subject and not as a DO. Therefore, this article aims to (1) shed light on what happens with the singular/plural alternation of the impersonal verb haber in the vernacular speech of Granada and (2) determine which linguistic and extralinguistic factors condition this morphosyntactic variation. In order to achieve this, a quantitative study was conducted by analyzing the examples from the AGENDA-GRAN corpus and by following the methodology proposed in the Guía PRESEEA de estudio del verbo haber impersonal (2021). The results show that the impersonal form is still widely used in Granada despite the progressive increase of personal forms in other Spanish-speaking territories.
Melgar et al. (Wed,) studied this question.