Gender agreement hierarchy in common gender and epicene nouns in Spanish

Anastasiia Ogneva

doi:10.7557/1.9.1.4839

Authors

Anastasiia Ogneva Department of Psychology, University of A Coruña

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/1.9.1.4839

Keywords:

grammatical gender, gender agreement, Spanish, epicenes, common gender nouns

Abstract

Gender is a grammatical category defined as an abstract morphosyntactic feature of nouns reflected in characteristics of associated words (i.e. agreement) (Hockett, 1958; Corbett, 1991). Agreement is, in fact, easily established in “transparent” nouns which follow either semantic or formal rule of gender agreement. However, when we deal with ambiguous nouns regarding their gender, agreement is not straightforward. In this article we aim to pursue two main goals. Firstly, to review and briefly describe grammatical gender system in Spanish (§1) with a special focus on so called “ambiguous” or “problematic” nouns (§2). Secondly, to review agreement hierarchy theories and explore if they are applicable for Spanish epicenes and common gender nouns (§3). Discussion and conclusion remarks are presented in (§4).

References

Anderson, J.M. (1961). The morphophonemics of gender in Spanish nouns. Lingua 10, pp. 285-296.

Aronoff, M. & Fudeman, K. (2005). What is Morphology? Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.

Caldevilla Rodríguez, C. (2017). El género gramatical en español. MA thesis. Oviedo: University of Oviedo. Available at http://digibuo.uniovi.es/dspace/bitstream/10651/43526/3/TFM_Caldevilla%20Rodr%C3%ADguez.pdf.

Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Corbett, G.G. (2006). Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Corbett, G.G. (2013a). Number of Genders. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals.info/chapter/30.

Corbett, G.G. (2013b). Sex-based and non-sex based gender systems. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals.info/chapter/31.

Corbett, G.G. (2013c). Systems of gender assignment. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals.info/chapter/32

González Calvo, J.M. (1979). El género, ¿una categoría morfológica? Anuario de estudios filológicos 2, pp. 51-73.

Harris, J.W. (1991). The Exponence of Gender in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry 22 (1), pp. 27-62.

Hockett, C.F. (1958). A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: Macmillan.

Ibrahim, M.H. (1973). Grammatical gender. The Hague: Mouton.

Lledó Cunill, E. (2006). Las profesiones de la A a la Z. Madrid: Gráficas Monterreina, S.A.

Martínez Méndez, K.R. (2015). Tienen sexo las profesiones. Hombres y mujeres en profesiones femeninas y masculinas, el caso de los enfermeros y las ingenieras mecánicas electricistas. Doctoral thesis. San Luis: El Colegio de San Luis.

Nesset, T. (2006). Gender meets the usage-based model: Four principles ofthe rule interaction in gender assignment. Lingua 116, pp. 1369–1393.

Pérez-Pereira, M. (1991). The acquisition of gender: what Spanish children tell us? Journal of Child Language 18, pp. 571-590. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900011259

Real Academia Española & Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010). Nueva gramática de la lengua: manual. Madrid: Espasa.

Rice, C. (2006). Optimizing gender. Lingua 116, pp.1394-1417.

Rodina, Y. (2008). Semantics and morphology: The acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian. Doctoral thesis. Tromso: University of Tromso. Available at https://munin.uit.no/handle/10037/2247.