Terminal letters, phonemes, and morphemes in Spanish gender assignment
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Regina Morin
Abstract
Much research establishing phonemic bases for grammatical gender assignment in Spanish nouns relies on straightforward word counts, some of them rather small, and does not examine the characteristics of individual words. No distinction is made between native Spanish words and loanwords, or between terminal letter, terminal phoneme, and terminal morpheme. As a result, some useful generalizations are lost, and others, less useful, have been accepted as true and repeated over and over. When large amounts of data are examined in detail, it becomes clear that in many cases noun ending does not serve to establish a significant statistical pattern with respect to gender assignment. However, some very large groups of words share some very productive terminal morphemes, which are invariably masculine or feminine. Sorting out noun ending from terminal morphemes makes it much easier to identify patterns of gender assignment in a system that is otherwise quite random and arbitrary.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
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Articles in the same Issue
- The origins of grammaticalization in the verbalization of experience
- Is perception a directional relationship? On directionality and its motivation in Finnish expressions of sensory perception
- An investigation into Cantonese ESL learners' acquisition of English initial consonant clusters
- Terminal letters, phonemes, and morphemes in Spanish gender assignment
- Semantic bias and morphological regularity in the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: what is the relation?
- Lexical signaling of information structure in Akan
- Three types of reflexive verbs in German
- Notice from the Board of Editors
