Variable agreement constructions in Spanish: between perception modalities and conceptual foregrounding

This article investigates how cognitive and grammatical mechanisms shape variable singular-plural agreement in Spanish perception-verb constructions, a domain where speakers alternate between agreement with the postverbal NP2 and agreement with the infinitival complement. Building on usage-based and cognitive linguistics approaches, the study examines whether factors related to perceptual modality and conceptual salience underlie these alternations. A corpus analysis of pronominal infinitive constructions with ver and oír reveals divergent patterns across modalities, with visual perception favoring plural agreement and auditory perception favoring singular agreement. To evaluate whether these tendencies reflect deeper linguistic preferences, an acceptability-rating task systematically manipulated modality, agreement, and animacy. The results show no overall interaction between modality and agreement, but they identify a robust effect of animacy: sentences with human referents received higher ratings than those with inanimate referents. Moreover, animacy modulated the influence of modality and agreement in opposite directions, suggesting that speakers’ evaluations are sensitive to the ontological nature of the perceived stimulus. Together, the findings show that agreement variation reflects flexible conceptual construal, and that corpus and experimental evidence offer complementary insights into the interface between morphosyntax, perception and salience in Spanish.