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Diachronic development of gender in city names in Spanish.
- Source :
- STUF: Language Typology & Universals; Nov2019, Vol. 72 Issue 4, p505-538, 34p
- Publication Year :
- 2019
-
Abstract
- This paper examines the gender assignment rules that apply to city names in the history of Spanish, relying for the first time on extensive corpus-based material. The empirical data show that gender assignment changed from a referential principle that consistently assigned city names to the feminine (due to the feminine basic level noun for 'city') to a phonologically driven assignment rule, with city names ending in -a generally being assigned to the feminine (e.g. Barcelona) and those ending in -o or -C to the masculine (e.g. Toledo, Madrid). However, the overall picture is much more complicated than previously suggested in the literature since there is still a high degree of gender variation in Modern Spanish. The use of the feminine is still possible in city names ending in -o or -C. Interestingly, the change from referential to phonological gender assignment occurs first within the NP (mainly with quantifiers such as tod- o/-a 'all-m/-f'). It is in this morphosyntactic context that city names with final -a most commonly shift from the feminine to the masculine gender. This case of "evasive gender" will be discussed from a typological perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- WOMEN in development
SPANISH history
GENDER
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 18678319
- Volume :
- 72
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- STUF: Language Typology & Universals
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 139602459
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1515/stuf-2019-0020