El abundante agua fría: Hermaphroditic Spanish Nouns
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David Eddington
Abstract
According to some Spanish grammarians, including the Royal Spanish Academy, nouns like agua ‘water’, asa ‘handle’, etc., are feminine and take a phonologicallyconditioned allomorph of the definite article (el) that is identical to the masculine article. Our data, both from an experiment and from electronic searches, show that there is considerable fluctuation in the gender of prenominal, but not postnominal, modifiers, with nouns in this group even when no phonological conditioning is found. The facts are incompatible with models where nouns bear a specific gender feature of the lexicon, which they assign to all targets of agreement. Instead, these facts of hybrid agreement are best accounted for in an exemplar model. Regardless of the phonological origin of the phenomenon, speakers interpret sequences such as el agua as showing masculine agreement, which creates an analogical attractor for non-etymological agreement with prenominal modifiers, as in poco agua, el abundante agua, etc.
© 2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Front Matter
- Contents
- From the Editor’s Desk
- Research Articles
- El abundante agua fría: Hermaphroditic Spanish Nouns
- Vítimas e perpetradores: Discurso reportado e identidade em narrativas de discriminação racial
- Integración conceptual (blending) en el proceso de gramaticalización de construcciones nominales cuantificativas en español
- A Tale of Two Borders: 19th Century Language Contact in Southern California and Northern Uruguay
- Book Reviews
- Segmental and Prosodic Issues in Romance Phonology
- State of the Discipline. Topic: Corpus Linguistics
- New Directions in Spanish and Portuguese Corpus Linguistics
- Viewpoints. Topic: The Place of Dialectology in Modern Linguistics
- Some Thoughts on Dialectology and Spanish Historical Linguistics
- Viewpoint from Sociolinguistics and Contact Linguistics: On the Role of Dialectology in Modern Linguistics
- Homeless in Post-Modern Linguistics? (Re/Dis)placing Hispanic Dialectology
- Affirming Differences, Valuing Variation and Dismissing Dialects in Modern Linguistics
- Dissertation Notices
- A macro- and microsociolinguistic study of language attitudes and language contact: Mercosur and the teaching of Spanish in Brazil
- The acquisition of probabilistic patterns in Spanish phonology by adult second language learners: The case of diphthongization
- The role of lexical frequency and phonetic context in the weakening of syllablefinal lexical /s/ in the Spanish of Barranquilla, Colombia
- Register and style variation in speakers of Spanish as a heritage and as a second language
Articles in the same Issue
- Front Matter
- Contents
- From the Editor’s Desk
- Research Articles
- El abundante agua fría: Hermaphroditic Spanish Nouns
- Vítimas e perpetradores: Discurso reportado e identidade em narrativas de discriminação racial
- Integración conceptual (blending) en el proceso de gramaticalización de construcciones nominales cuantificativas en español
- A Tale of Two Borders: 19th Century Language Contact in Southern California and Northern Uruguay
- Book Reviews
- Segmental and Prosodic Issues in Romance Phonology
- State of the Discipline. Topic: Corpus Linguistics
- New Directions in Spanish and Portuguese Corpus Linguistics
- Viewpoints. Topic: The Place of Dialectology in Modern Linguistics
- Some Thoughts on Dialectology and Spanish Historical Linguistics
- Viewpoint from Sociolinguistics and Contact Linguistics: On the Role of Dialectology in Modern Linguistics
- Homeless in Post-Modern Linguistics? (Re/Dis)placing Hispanic Dialectology
- Affirming Differences, Valuing Variation and Dismissing Dialects in Modern Linguistics
- Dissertation Notices
- A macro- and microsociolinguistic study of language attitudes and language contact: Mercosur and the teaching of Spanish in Brazil
- The acquisition of probabilistic patterns in Spanish phonology by adult second language learners: The case of diphthongization
- The role of lexical frequency and phonetic context in the weakening of syllablefinal lexical /s/ in the Spanish of Barranquilla, Colombia
- Register and style variation in speakers of Spanish as a heritage and as a second language
