El abundante agua fría: Hermaphroditic Spanish Nouns

Abstract According to some Spanish grammarians, including the Royal Spanish Academy, nouns like agua ‘water’, asa ‘handle’, etc., are feminine and take a phonologicallyconditioned allomorph of the definite article (el) that is identical to the masculine article. Our data, both from an experiment and from electronic searches, show that there is considerable fluctuation in the gender of prenominal, but not postnominal, modifiers, with nouns in this group even when no phonological conditioning is found. The facts are incompatible with models where nouns bear a specific gender feature of the lexicon, which they assign to all targets of agreement. Instead, these facts of hybrid agreement are best accounted for in an exemplar model. Regardless of the phonological origin of the phenomenon, speakers interpret sequences such as el agua as showing masculine agreement, which creates an analogical attractor for non-etymological agreement with prenominal modifiers, as in poco agua, el abundante agua, etc.

摘要 根据包括西班牙皇家语言学院在内的一些西班牙语法学家的观点，像agua（“水”）、asa（“把手”）等名词为阴性，并且使用定冠词（el）的一种受语音条件制约的词素变体，该变体与阳性冠词相同。我们从实验和电子检索中获取的数据表明，前置修饰语的性存在相当大的波动，而后置修饰语则没有，即便在未发现语音制约的情况下，这组名词也是如此。这些事实与名词在词典中具有特定性特征并将其赋予所有一致关系目标的模型不相符。相反，这些混合一致的事实在范例模型中能得到最好的解释。无论这种现象的语音起源如何，说话者将诸如el agua这样的序列解释为显示阳性一致，这为前置修饰语的非词源一致创造了一个类推吸引子，比如在poco agua（“少量的水”）、el abundante agua（“大量的水”）等中。