Martha McGinnis: Gender in DM (reply to Heidi Harley)

[Martha McGinnis]

>Actually, I'd like to find out more about why there's a principled
>difference between genders and noun classes without actually having
>to read anything if anyone wanted to summarize it -- Jonathan?

I thought I'd answer despite not being Jonathan.  Gender affects
agreement (e.g., on determiners and adjectives), but noun declension
class just determines the form of the inflections on the noun.  For
example, Spanish has both noun declension classes and gender, but
they don't completely overlap: 'mano' (hand) and 'muchacho' (boy) are
both in declension class 1 (ends in -o), but 'mano' is feminine and
'muchacho' is masculine.

   El muchacho es feo. 'The boy is ugly.'
   La mano es fea. 'The hand is ugly.'

This snippet of information is brought to you from Rolf Noyer's
morphology class notes, 1/11/99.


mcginnis at ucalgary.ca