Towards a syntactic characterisation of nominal gender in Spanish
https://doi.org/10.31810/rsel.52.1.2
Keywords:
gender; classifiers; concordance; gender alternations; nanosyntax.Abstract
This article presents a syntactic proposal about the internal structure of gender in Spanish. We argue that the mixture of derivational and inflectional properties exhibited by Spanish gender is explained by the fact that the relevant exponents (-o and -a) materialize a sequence of heads that are divided into two differentiated areas, one referring to the classification of entities (nominal classifiers) and another referring to the definition of phi features (gender proper). Once these two areas are differentiated, it is possible to account for the nine classes of nouns that Spanish differentiates by their gender and morphological marking behaviour in a direct way that does not require dissolving the distinction between word formation processes and the processes that introduce the grammatical markers of a category.
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