Call for papers: Monographic issue on Gender in Romance languages

2025-03-21

Special Issue on Grammatical Gender in Romance Languages: Grammatical and Typological Perspectives

Guest Edited by Carmela Tomé Cornejo and Gabriela Mariel Zunino

Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics is receiving submissions for a special issue on Grammatical Gender in Romance Languages: Grammatical and Typological Perspectives. This volume aims to bring together synchronic studies that explore the nature and functioning of grammatical gender in Romance languages from various theoretical frameworks, with the goal of providing a broad and updated perspective on its characterization and variation within this language family.

Gender is a fundamental category in Romance languages, raising multiple controversial issues, including its grammatical status and its interaction with both linguistic and extralinguistic features. From morphological and syntactic perspectives, discussions have focused on its nature, its impact on the grammatical system of natural languages, noun assignment mechanisms and the classes it can generate, as well as inconsistencies in agreement (Fábregas, 2022, 2024; Kramer, 2020; Mendívil, 2020). At the same time, other approaches have explored the relationship between this grammatical category and cognition (Samuel, Cole & Eacott, 2019), as well as its acquisition in both first and additional languages, contributing to its theoretical characterization (Lohndal & Westergaard, 2021).

In the context of ongoing linguistic change, where various speech communities have begun to use and promote additional gender markers to challenge binarism and the masculinizing bias of generic forms, this special issue aims to deepen the characterization of grammatical gender in different Romance languages, integrating a variationist perspective at both intra-linguistic and inter-linguistic levels.

We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Representation of gender in different grammatical models
  • Gender and linguistic typology
  • Variation and change in the expression of grammatical gender in Romance languages
  • Language contact and the influence of other languages on gender expression
  • The acquisition of gender in Romance languages and its role in defining gender as a grammatical category

Submission deadline: June 15, 2025

Articles must follow the Borealis journal guidelines and will undergo a double-blind peer review process. The journal accepts publications in Spanish, Catalan, and English. For more information on submission procedures and editorial guidelines, please visit the journal’s website: https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/borealis/index.

For inquiries regarding this special issue, please contact the guest editors at the following email addresses: carmela_tome@usal.es and gmzunino@conicet.gov.ar

We look forward to your contributions.

References

Fábregas, A. (2022). Hacia una caracterización sintáctica del género del sustantivo en español. Revista española de lingüística 52, 39-96. doi.org/10.31810/rsel.52.1.2.

Fábregas, A. (2024).The Fine-grained Structure of the Lexical Area. Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, John Benjamins Publishing Company. doi.org/10.1075/ihll.39

Kramer, R. (2020). Grammatical Gender: A Close Look at Gender Assignment Across Languages. Annual Review of Linguistics 6, 45-66. doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-012450

Lohndal, T. & Westergaard, M. (2021). Grammatical Gender: Acquisition, Attrition, and Change. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 33(1), 95-121. doi:10.1017/S1470542720000057

Mendívil, J. L. (2020). El género inclusivo en español. Revista de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística 50, 35-64. doi.org/10.31810/RSEL.50.1.2.

Samuel, S., Cole, G. & Eacott, M.J. (2019). Grammatical gender and linguistic relativity: A systematic review. Psychon Bull Rev 26, 1767–1786. doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01652-3