Gender agreement hierarchy in common gender and epicene nouns in Spanish

Anastasiia Ogneva

doi:10.7557/1.9.1.4839

Abstract

Gender is a grammatical category defined as an abstract morphosyntactic feature of nouns reflected in characteristics of associated words (i.e. agreement) (Hockett, 1958; Corbett, 1991). Agreement is, in fact, easily established in “transparent” nouns which follow either semantic or formal rule of gender agreement. However, when we deal with ambiguous nouns regarding their gender, agreement is not straightforward. In this article we aim to pursue two main goals. Firstly, to review and briefly describe grammatical gender system in Spanish (§1) with a special focus on so called “ambiguous” or “problematic” nouns (§2). Secondly, to review agreement hierarchy theories and explore if they are applicable for Spanish epicenes and common gender nouns (§3). Discussion and conclusion remarks are presented in (§4).

Highlights

Grammatical gender is a common characteristic of the Indo-European languages.According to the World Atlas of Language Structures (Corbett, 2013a), approximately a half of the sampled languages (n = 112) does present a gender system, whereas in over a half of the samples (n = 144) there is no gender distinction for nouns
In terms of gender assignment, some languages have sex-based systems of grammatical gender, that is, biological sex of referents is the core to distinguish between feminine and masculine
The aim of this paper was to address the issue of gender agreement in “problematic”

Summary

Introduction

Grammatical gender is a common characteristic of the Indo-European languages. According to the World Atlas of Language Structures (Corbett, 2013a), approximately a half of the sampled languages (n = 112) does present a gender system, whereas in over a half of the samples (n = 144) there is no gender distinction for nouns. In terms of gender assignment, some languages have sex-based systems of grammatical gender, that is, biological sex of referents is the core to distinguish between feminine and masculine. Masculine default is observed in agreement between neuter pronouns and predicates, as predicate adjectives do not have neuter forms. According to Corbett (1991), masculine and feminine genders have a semantic core, and that is why they follow semantic assignment rules: a. The sex-differentiable nouns have two forms: one masculine and one feminine. Harris (1991: 38-39) claims that Spanish animate or sex-differentiable nouns can be included in different groups, according to their formal characteristics: 1) Nouns which have a masculine and a feminine form (e.g., muchacho ‘boy, muchacha ‘girl’). 5) Nouns, which contain word marker -a, can be either masculine or feminine (e.g., artista ‘artist-M/F)

GENDER AGREEMENT HIERARCHY IN COMMON GENDER AND EPICENE NOUNS

Discussion

Findings

Journal of