A Fork in the Road

Grammatical Gender Assignment to Nouns in Spanish Dialects

Bibliographic Data

ID5901000
AuthorsFlorencio Del Barrio De La Rosa (0000-0002-6008-1004, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume8
Issue4
Pages257
Publication date2023-10-30
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguages (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages8040257
OpenAlexW4388017959
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited26

Spanish nouns are classified as either feminine or masculine. Although some nouns vary depending on their denotation (such as niño 'male child' vs. niña 'female child'), in most cases a fixed gender is assigned. When lacking an inflectional cue, nouns could variably admit both genders. While alternating gender may be present in standard Spanish (e.g., azúcar moreno 'brown.m sugar' vs. azúcar blanquilla 'white.f sugar'), it predominantly depends on social or geographical factors (e.g., la vinagre 'the.f vinegar', el sal 'the.m salt' unlike standard el vinagre 'the.m vinegar', la sal 'the.f salt'). Thus, Spanish binary system represents a fork in the road of gender assignment to nouns. Focused on European Spanish, the present study addresses the sociogeographical influences conditioning gender values in Spanish nouns. To the best of my knowledge, no previous research has been systematically conducted on gender assignment in modern Spanish dialects, so my findings shall shed light on how gender values are determined and diffused across rural and urban varieties. Data are retrieved mainly from the Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural and the Proyecto para el estudio sociolingüístico del español de España y América), as well as other bibliographical and dialectal sources

Geography · Grammatical Gender · Linguistics · Noun · Gender Studies in Language · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Psychology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

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