Noun Classification: Types and Gender in Spanish
Substantive Classification: Semantic and Morphological Perspectives
Semantic Classification
Proper vs. Common Nouns
- Proper nouns refer to a single, unique object (univocal).
- Common nouns refer to multiple objects (multivalent).
Proper nouns have a significant object (designation), while common nouns have significance.
Concrete vs. Abstract Nouns
- Concrete nouns refer to specific, identifiable objects.
- Abstract nouns refer to concepts perceived through understanding (abstraction), often ending in -ure, -tion, -eza (e.g., whiteness, goodness, beauty). They exist in the realm of ideas but can sometimes become practical.
Individual vs. Collective Nouns
Collective nouns refer to a set or group of specific individuals. There are also classifications like animate/inanimate and human/inhuman.
Morphological Classification
Simple vs. Compound Nouns
- Compound nouns are formed by several lexemes (e.g., corkscrew) and can be iterative (e.g., real coffee).
- Simple nouns consist of a single lexeme.
Primitive vs. Derivative Nouns
- Derivative nouns are formed from other words using prefixes, suffixes, and affixes (e.g., back room, shopkeeper, little shop). Adding a morpheme to a simple noun can create new words.
- Primitive nouns have no composition or derivation, having undergone only phonetic changes.
Gender Morphemes
Gender morphemes categorize nouns without changing their core meaning. Gender is often conceived as a sexual distinction, with masculine and feminine for the animate world and neuter for the inanimate.
Types of Gender
- Real Gender: The masculine/feminine distinction corresponds to reality (living world).
- Abstract Gender: The distinction does not correspond to reality (inanimate world), e.g., case, stylus.
Gender can be indicated morphologically (with morphemes -a/-o) or lexically (with different words, called heteronyms, e.g., father-mother). Most Spanish nouns have lexical gender, with fewer having morphological gender.
System of Gender Oppositions
There are three types of gender: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Masculine and feminine are used in the animate world, while neuter is used in the inanimate world. This is a privative opposition (one has something the other does not) and is also neutralizable (e.g., “man is mortal”).
Masculine can include feminine, but not vice versa. Feminine is more semantically marked. There’s also epicene gender for animal names (e.g., eagle, elephant) and common gender, where the same word is used for both men and women (e.g., el/la control).
Ambiguous gender allows a noun to be used as either masculine or feminine (e.g., el/la mar). While gender has external centralization (commonsyncretism), ambiguous gender has internal centralization. Sometimes, nouns are masculinized or feminized in discourse (e.g., embajador/a).
Neutral Nouns
Neutral nouns can be deverbales (e.g., student, singer) depending on their use in language or speech. In practice, there are no truly neutral nouns.
Types of Neutralization
- Internal Neutralization: Allowed by the language system itself (e.g., el mar, el martes). This can depend on the speaker’s position.
- External Neutralization: Occurs in speech when using language (e.g., “estudiantes” to refer to the whole class). In this case, masculine neutralizes feminine, but not the other way around.
Anderson’s Classification of Substantives
Gender
- Variable Nouns: Add a gender morpheme.
- Inflectional: A morpheme is added to the root.
- Derivational: An infix is added between the root and the gender morpheme.
- Unchanged Nouns: Do not change, are set for masculine and feminine.
- Masculine: -o (book), -e (man), -Ø (paper), -a (day).
- Feminine: -a (house), -e (mother), -Ø (woman), -o (hand).
There is a defective distribution of morphemes that indicate gender without needing to differentiate between masculine and feminine.