Nouns and Their Modifiers

Abstract

The traditional understanding of noun is “the name of a person, place, thing or quality.” A form-based definition for noun in Spanish could well be “that part of speech with inherent gender.” Indeed, every noun is inherently either masculine or feminine, while other words which show gender (e.g. modifiers, pronouns) acquire it only through their agreement with a noun. Thus in caso sencillo, caso is listed in the lexicon (speaker’s mental dictionary) as being masculine, but sencillo carries no INHERENT gender assignment, becoming masculine via agreement with caso. The same is true for casa in casa sencilla: casa is lexically classed as feminine, but sencilla acquires feminine gender only thanks to agreement with the noun it modifies.