Subjunctive as the Marker of Subordination

Abstract

For half a century Professor Ronald Hilton of Stanford University has been collecting double-gender nouns in Spanish and Portuguese. He now has a card-index of some 2,000 examples. This peculiarly Spanish phenomenon is much more widespread than generally realized. The differences in meaning between the masculine and feminine forms (el manzano-la manzana; orden-la orden, etc.) reflect a complex of basic principles which will be analyzed in the introduction to the proposed dictionary. Sometimes the difference is simply geographical, as in el boleto-la boleta. The proposed dictionary should include, where relevant, indications of the geographical range of each entry. Because of the heavy burden of editing the World Affairs Report, Professor Hilton will be unable to bring the project to fruition himself, and he has asked Hispania associate editor John P. Wonder, in cooperation with his Hispania colleague Richard Teschner, to study the means of completing the project. A first step would be to find out which scholars have done