The coding of sex in Spanish nouns

Publication date: Available online 24 November 2018Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Carlos-Eduardo PiñerosAbstractTraditional views on how sex is coded in Spanish nouns are revolutionized in this article. To the initial discovery that sex coding yields not only singlets and doublets but also triplets, it is added that Spanish employs three sex coding modes whose productivity correlates with structural cost. The suppletive and the derivational modes require investing in sex-specific morphemes, which makes them costly, whereas the inflectional mode achieves maximal economy by exploiting the exponent of another grammatical category: declension. The transfer of productive sex coding to the grammar is another major innovation. Lexical Specification is appropriate to formalize the suppletive and the de...

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