Monolingual English speakers telling often bilingual Spanish speakers what to do. What else is new?
Besides, bringing in gender is kinda simplistic cuz it's not really gendered words. Best explication I've seen?
"These are the starting points of the present study: First, the set of examples in (1)
is so impoverished as to support no general conclusion. The -a and -o in (1) belong to
a class of seven or more morphologically analogous elements that participate in no fewer
than twenty-four different relationships with gender. I will call these elements word
markers.2 Second, (2) errs in conflating biological sex (male versus female), grammatical
gender (masculine versus feminine), and form class (-o versus -a). I will argue that these
are interrelated but autonomous domains of linguistic generalization, each one of which
demands independent formal representation. Sex is a matter of semantics and/or biology,
gender is involved in syntax-dependent concord, and form class is a matter of the mor-
phophonology of individual lexical items. Insight into the true nature and interaction of
these modules depends on understanding the internal organization of each; this cannot
be gained without recognizing the autonomy of each module with respect to the others."
(...)
"Tradition has it that the -o of such nouns as maestr-o '(male) teacher', tor-o 'bull',
disc-o 'disk', and the -a of such nouns as maestr-a '(female) teacher', vac-a 'cow',
cint-a 'tape' are gender-marking suffixes. Tradition is wrong: the -o and -a in question
belong to a set of exponents of declensional class. They are markers of pure form;
members of a particular form class uniquely share no attribute other than membership
in that class. The class-marking suffixes have no meaning or function; they obey no
higher semantic or syntactic authority. They are simply pieces of form that must be at
the right place at the right time, by their own rules. They may perform an incidental
phonological service by permitting syllabification of otherwise impermissible clusters.
For example, nt cannot be tautosyllabic in Spanish, and the -a of cint-a allows the
syllabification cin.ta. But this service can be rendered in other ways. For example, the
stem tint- 'tint' belongs to a declensional class that has no vocalic suffix. In this case
nt is saved by epenthesis: tin.te.
Reduced to its essentials, the argument that the suffixes in question are declension-
class markers rather than gender markers is this: These suffixes share a unique pattern
of distribution. They thus constitute a coherent set of morphemes. The form classes
defined by these morphemes, however, are unrestricted with respect to gender; each
may contain masculine, feminine, and gender-ambiguous nouns, adjectives, and speci-
fiers. Moreover, adverbs-which are strictly genderless-are scattered throughout the
various form classes. These cannot, therefore, be gender classes.
The exponence of gender in Spanish is modular in that it involves four interrelated
but autonomous domains of linguistic generalization: biological/semantic sex, syntactic
gender, morphophonological form classes, and strictly phonological redundancy rela-
tions. We cannot gain insight into the interactions among these modules unless we have
some understanding of the separateness and internal organization of each."
The Exponence of Gender in Spanish
Author(s): James W. Harris
Source: Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Winter, 1991), pp. 27-62
