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Syntactic Geolectal Variation: Traditional approaches, current challenges and new tools
Edited by Alba Cerrudo, Ángel J. Gallego and Francesc Roca Urgell
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 34] 2021
► pp. 175–202

Chapter 6
Feature analysis of neuter gender in Spanish and Asturian languages

| Universidad Complutense de Madrid
| Universidad Complutense de Madrid

It is traditionally considered that there are three values for pronominal gender (masculine, feminine, neuter). In this chapter, we explore the idea that there are no neuter pronouns in Spanish, as neuter doesn’t show agreement effects. Then we focus on mass neuter agreement, a phenomenon that takes place in an area of Central and Northern Peninsular Spanish. After studying the kind of syntactic information that can be obtained from syntactic atlases, we present an overview of the phenomenon from a purely descriptive point of view. We finally focus on demonstratives and we claim that the Asturian demonstrative esto with a mass noun antecedent is a determiner that takes an uncountable null noun as its complement, whose features are contextually recovered.

Keywords: neuter pronouns, mass neuter agreement, demonstratives, gender, syntactic atlases
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Neuter gender in Spanish
    • 2.1Grammatical properties of neuter pronouns
    • 2.2The gender of neuter pronouns
  • 3.Mass neuter agreement
    • 3.1Definition and description
    • 3.2Data from atlases and dialectal corpus
    • 3.3Mass neuter gender in nouns
    • 3.4Mass neuter agreement and adjectives
    • 3.5Mass neuter agreement and determiners
  • 4.The analysis of neuter demonstrative pronouns
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.34.06gil
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