Feature analysis of neuter gender in Spanish and Asturian languages

Abstract

ABSTRACT: It is traditionally considered that there are three values for pronominal gender (masculine, feminine, neuter). In this chapter, we explore the idea that there are no neuter pronouns in Spanish, as neuter doesn’t show agreement effects. Then we focus on mass neuter agreement, a phenomenon that takes place in an area of Central and Northern Peninsular Spanish. After studying the kind of syntactic information that can be obtained from syntactic atlases, we present an overview of the phenomenon from a purely descriptive point of view. We finally focus on demonstratives and we claim that the Asturian demonstrative «esto» with a mass noun antecedent is a determiner that takes an uncountable null noun as its complement, whose features are contextually recovered.