Nominal agreement in Spanish. Spanish morphologically encodes for both gender and number. Gender agree- ment and Number agreement occur between nouns and other elements in the sentence such as determiners and adjectives, which is the focus of the present study (Xxxxx-Xxxxxx et al. 2002). Nouns in Spanish can be singular or plural. As the Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española (RAE 2009) states, ‘number in nouns provides quantitative information about the entities that are being designated, while number in adjectives does not provide significant information, it is only there for agreement constraints’1 (1.8 k). As can be seen in examples (2) and (3), Spanish marks for plural via an -s/-es suffix (White et al. 2004).
(1) el perr-o negr-o
(2) l-o-s perr-o-s negr-o-s
(3) l-a-s sill-a-s negr-a-s the-FEM-PL chair-FEM-PL black-FEM-PL ‘The black chairs’ As far as gender is concerned, we classify nouns in terms of their grammatical gender, mostly arbitrary, meaning that the majority of nouns in Spanish have no relation between their grammatical gender and any concept of female or male properties in the real world, and, although it might overlap, grammatical gender is different from intrinsic gender (White et al. 2004). The class of semantic gender nouns or intrinsic gender noun includes a small set of animate nouns whose morphological endings correspond to their biological sex:
(4) dueñ-a
(5) dueñ-o
(6) l-a mesa pesad-a
(7) el libro pesad-o
(8) l-a mesa azul xxx-XXX.XX xxxxx.XXX.XX xxxx.XX. ‘The blue table’
(9) l-o-s libro-s pesad-o-s
Nominal agreement in Spanish. Spanish morphologically encodes for both gender and number. Gender agree- ment and Number agreement occur between nouns and other elements in the sentence such as determiners and adjectives, which is the focus of the present study (Xxxxx-Xxxxxx et al. 2002). Nouns in Spanish can be singular or plural. As the Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española (RAE 2009) states, ‘number in nouns provides quantitative information about the entities that are being designated, while number in adjectives does not provide significant information, it is only there for agreement constraints’1 (1.8 k). As can be seen in examples (2) and (3), Spanish marks for plural via an -s/-es suffix (White et al. 2004).
(1) el perr-o negr-o
(2) l-o-s perr-o-s negr-o-s
(3) l-a-s sill-a-s negr-a-s
(4) dueñ-a
(5) dueñ-o
(6) l-a mesa pesad-a
(7) el libro pesad-o
(8) l-a mesa azul xxx-XXX.XX xxxxx.XXX.XX xxxx.XX. ‘The blue table’
(9) l-o-s libro-s pesad-o-s
Nominal agreement in Spanish. In research on the acquisition of the Spanish grammatical gender system, assignment and agreement are two fundamental features. As Audring (2008) describes, “genders are defined as systems of agreement classes, and the assignment of nouns to genders is reflected in the agreement they consistently trigger on associated elements” (pp. 93). Gender assignment affects gender agreement between the noun and the related elements (Xxxxxx & Xxxxx, 2014). The assignment of gender is mostly arbitrary and different in various languages. Xxxxxxx (1991) suggests two types of gender assignment systems for grammatical gender languages: semantic systems and formal systems. Assignment based on the meaning of the noun is called a semantic system and based on the form of the noun is a formal system. Spanish has both a semantic system and a formal system. Audring (2008) even distinguishes three types of gender assignment rules, which are also based on the property of the noun: semantic, phonological and morphological gender assignment rules. These rules have the function of facilitating learning and memorising of the gender of each noun and making it possible to allocate new nouns to a gender. As already mentioned, Spanish is a grammatical gender language. It has a binary gender system, which means that a noun is either masculine or feminine (Xxxxxxx, 2011). There are animate and inanimate nouns. In animate nouns, gender is assigned corresponding to biological sex, as in examples (1) till (4). There are masculine and feminine variants of these words.
(1) Abogado
(2) Abogada
