Diachronic development of gender in city names in Spanish

AbstractThis 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-agenerally being assigned to the feminine (e.g.Barcelona) and those ending in-oor-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 varia…