The morphophonemics of gender in Spanish nouns

Abstract

It is suggested that there are no monomorphemic nouns in Spanish, i.e., gender functions as a morpheme with all nouns. Gender morphemes can be determined in several ways: through paradigmatic opposition in the variable nouns and through segmentation and syntagmatic alternation in the invariable nouns. Gender morphemes are represented by various allomorphs which correspond to particular sub-classes of nouns in the short form, and are always the last element in the noun, maintaining this position even when the diminutive and augmentative suffixes are added. After diminutive and augmentative suffixes, however, the gender morpheme is represented by the basic form of the allomorph / and /-a/. Appendix B describes in terms of formulas the eleven classes of variables and the eight classes of invariable nouns.