Terminal letters, phonemes, and morphemes in Spanish gender assignment

Abstract

Much research establishing phonemic bases for grammatical gender assignment in Spanish nouns relies on straightforward word counts, some of them rather small, and does not examine the characteristics of individual words. No distinction is made between native Spanish words and loanwords, or between terminal letter, terminal phoneme, and terminal morpheme. As a result, some useful generalizations are lost, and others, less useful, have been accepted as true and repeated over and over. When large amounts of data are examined in detail, it becomes clear that in many cases noun ending does not serve to establish a significant statistical pattern with respect to gender assignment. However, some very large groups of words share some very productive terminal morphemes, which are invariably masculine or feminine. Sorting out noun ending from terminal morphemes makes it much easier to identify patterns of gender assignment in a system that is otherwise quite random and arbitrary.