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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Diachronic development of gender in city names in Spanish

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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 variation in Modern Spanish. The use of the feminine is still possible in city names ending in-oor-C. Interestingly, the change from referential to phonological gender assignment occurs first within the NP (mainly with quantifiers such astod- o/-a‘all-m/-f’). It is in this morphosyntactic context that city names with final-amost commonly shift from the feminine to the masculine gender. This case of “evasive gender” will be discussed from a typological perspective.