The paper discusses the morphological status and the function of Spanish nominal endings -o and -a (ciel+o ‘sky’ vs. caj+a ‘box’); it is shown that both endings, plus the endings -e and -Ø, are inflectional suffixes that mark, however, not the values of an inflectional category (like nominal number or verbal tense), but the values of a feature of the syntactics of the noun — the nominal gender. The ‘nominal gender’ is defined as a cluster concept based on eight properties; it is a particular case of ‘agreement class’ opposed to ‘noun class.’ Some particularities of Spanish nominal gender are examined: its interaction with diminutive suffixes, gender conversion, and its “non-prototypical” character (a parallel is drawn between Spanish nominal genders and noun classes in Fula).
2018. Extreme classification. Cognitive Linguistics 29:4 ► pp. 633 ff.
CORBETT, GREVILLE G. & SEBASTIAN FEDDEN
2016. Canonical gender. Journal of Linguistics 52:3 ► pp. 495 ff.
Maiden, Martin
2016. The Romanian alternating gender in diachrony and synchrony. Folia Linguistica 37:1 ► pp. 111 ff.
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