The form classes of Spanish substantives

Abstract

According to deeply entrenched descriptive and pedagogical traditions, gender is the basic organizing factor in the inflectional morphology of Spanish nouns and adjectives. In ‘The Exponence of Gender in Spanish’ (Harris 1991, hereafter ‘EGS’), I have argued that this tradition is wrong: gender is only one of three interrelated but distinct and autonomous domains relevant to inflection, namely, biological/semantic sex, syntactic gender, and morphological form class. Each of these domains has its own internal organization and its own formal mechanisms. For example, morphological form- class affiliation plays no role in syntactic gender concord, and the single monovalent diacritic mark motivated by gender asymmetries is not formally equivalent to any of the several marks needed to register the assignment of lexical items to form classes.¹

EGS demonstrates that the interaction of the proposed formal mechanisms in the domains of se, gender, and form class supports the solution of a certain problem of language acquisition that seems to involve the phenomenon of ‘negative evidence’