Plural Agreement in Infinitive Verbs of Costa Rican Spanish

Abstract

In Costa Rican Spanish, as in other varieties, clitic sequences, with a final pronoun in singular indirect object, can accept a plural mark which refers anaphorically to a subject; this is the case, for example, “tienen que ponersen vivos”, where the {-n} agrees with the subject of the main sentence. This produces the effect of infinitive agreement, something that, in principle, is excluded by the morphology of non-finite forms in standard Spanish. In this article, we advocate a global approach to this type of plural, by putting it in relation to other similar structures.