Mike Maxwell: gender (reply to Karlos Arregui)

[Martha McGinnis]

I'm dabbling in a theory of morphology that I'm not very familiar with here,
so if I'm asking a question that's been answered elsewhere, feel free to
point me in the right direction!

Karlos Arregi (I think: the email says its from Martha McGinnis, but I assume
she's forwarding it?) wrote wrt Spanish:

>Many roots can appear with both genders. In
>some cases, the meaning difference is completely
>predictable from natural gender, as in gat-o/a `cat'
>or chic-o/a `boy/girl'. In others, the meaning difference
>is totally unpredictable, as in libr-o/a `book/pound' or
>pal-o/a `stick/shovel'. Finally, there are cases in which
>the two words are related, but the meaning difference
>is not reducible to natural gender, as in naranj-o/a
>`orange tree / orange'.
>...
>To say that there are two different roots for each
>gender would be to complicate things unnecessarily.

I can see this in the case of natural gender (animate nouns), and I don't
have a strong opinion in the cases like naranj-o/a (and manzan-o/a--how
productive is this?), but I can't see why this should be extended to cases
like libr-o/a or pal-o/a, where to my mind there is at best an etymological
connection.  Is there any _empirical_ evidence in favor of treating the
'libr' of 'libro' and 'libra' as being the same root?  (or the 'pal' of
'palo' and 'pala')  Or is simplicity the only argument?  (I realize there
may be evidence in the case of affixes, like the English -s suffixes, but
it's not a priori clear that what is true of affixes must also be true of
roots.)

Assuming there is empirical evidence, do you extend this to verb roots of
different conjugation classes?  Like 'sent' of 'sentar' "to sit" and
'sentir' "to feel".  The two verbs have partially overlapping allomorphy
(both change to 'sient' when stressed), and partially distinct allomorphy
(the stem of 'sentir', but not 'sentar', changes to 'sint' in certain
environments).  Of course conjugation classes differ from gender classes wrt
their visibility outside the word, so this case may be different.

                                          Mike Maxwell
                                          SIL
                                          Mike_Maxwell at sil.org


[Moderator's note: Mike is right.  All messages look like they come
from me because I forward them to the dm-list.]