Gender assignment to English noun insertions in New York Dominican Spanish

Abstract

The current study explores which factors condition gender assignment to English noun insertions in New York Dominican Spanish and compares these results with previous studies on gender assignment to English noun insertions in Spanish. We find that while the gender of the referent, the analogical gender of the English noun, and homophony with a Spanish noun play significant roles in the gender assignment process, the phonological gender of the noun insertion and the presence of a derivational suffix do not. Reviewing previous studies on gender assignment to English nouns in Spanish, we conclude that although it is possible that the discrepancies between studies result in part from the establishment of different norms in different speech communities, a major source of these discrepancies appears to be a lack of consensus about how to define analogical gender and phonological gender.