Competing plural markers in Puerto Rican Spanish

This paper investigates possible competing plural markers in Puerto Rican Spanish, a topic suggested by Poplack's (1979) discussion of the development of plural marking in the Romance languages. Markers of plurality in NPs in our data were concentrated in the determiners; masculine plural determiners and nouns were found to be more likely than their feminine counterparts to lack the plural /s/ inflection. We propose that the /o/ in the masculine determiners los, estos, esos, unos, and aquellos is beginning to take over as the marker of plurality; this is why other plural markers are more likely to be deleted when there is a masculine determiner.