A Typology of West Iberian Grammatical Gender

Based on previous work that examines noun form and gender in Spanish and Asturian, this paper extends a DM account of grammatical gender and noun derivation to Portuguese and Galician. The aim is to shed light on how we might question the relation between noun form and gender in general. Secondary to this goal is to bring more awareness to linguistic phenomena to West Iberian languages, many of which are minoritized. This framework is further motivated by Kramer’s (2015) analysis of the morphosyntax of gender. She analyzes multiple languages within this framework, giving rise to more possibilities to adopt a more typological perspective. This paper’s claim is that West Iberian nouns can be organized into three form classes marked mainly by -e/-Ø, -a, -o/-u, depending on the language. Both feminine and masculine nouns are organized across these three classes and can end in any of these word markers. Issues arise when there are apparent mismatches between form and gender (cf. manof ‘hand’ or mapam ‘map’ in Spanish), and these cases are also explainable through the rule-based insertion of word markers onto theme nodes, either in the context of roots or the gender feature found on n. This paper shows that through DM we can further link West Iberian languages under one theory by grammatical gender and noun form. While the present study is merely a starting point, future work must be done to account for microvariation in these languages and incorporate languages from other regions of West Iberia.