«E creyéronlo el pueblo». Concordancia semántica y texto subyacente en el corpus Biblias hispánicas

Form and meaning agreement mismatches with collective nouns such as pueblo lead to intralinguisctic variation as Old Spanish biblical translations show. The present article examines semantic agreement triggered by the plural reference of collective nouns. These cases have received scant attention in historical grammar of Spanish and have been ignored as a characteristic feature of Old Spanish translations from the Hebrew Bible. The study analyzes how internal (i.e. subject position and predicate class) and external (i.e. register and source language) factors determine mismatches. Although Spanish semantic agreement occurrences are significantly conditioned by Biblical Hebrew, the article proves mismatches go beyond morphosyntactic calque and puts forward the hypothesis that plural agreement controlled by a collective noun may overtly express the distributive interpretation of predicates. Although further research must confirm this hypothesis, this explanation would apply to semantic agreement cases documented in historical and modern Spanish.