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Every Spanish noun has a specific gender, either masculine or feminine, in the context of a sentence. Generally, nouns referring to males or male animals are masculine, while those referring to females are feminine. [1] [2] In terms of importance, the masculine gender is the default or unmarked, while the feminine gender is marked or distinct. [2]
These are often known as possessive or genitive determiners. They are used before the noun referring to what is possessed (and before the rest of the whole noun phrase, for example when an adjective precedes the noun). They inflect for number and in some cases gender as well.
Here are some examples of English sentences and their cleft versions: "I did it." → "It was I who did it" or more colloquially "It was me that did it." "You will stop smoking through willpower." → "It is through willpower that you will stop smoking." Spanish does not usually employ such a structure in simple sentences.
Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to subject pronouns, and, like many European languages, Spanish makes a T-V distinction in second person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. Object pronouns can be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis.
The gender of nouns in this class may also mark distinctions related to size and shape, such as the distinction between el cántaro 'pitcher' and la cántara 'large pitcher'. [16] Further, some polysemic nouns can be distinguished by their gender. For example, el margen (masculine) means 'margin' while la margen means 'river bank'. [23]
The grammatical gender of a noun does not always coincide with its natural gender. An example of this is the German word Mädchen ("girl"); this is derived from Magd ("maiden"), umlauted to Mäd-with the diminutive suffix-chen, and this suffix always makes the noun grammatically neuter.
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.
This leads to sentences such as (5a) in English, and (6a) in French. Example of gender-neutral masculine: English (5) a. If anybody comes, tell him. masculine him used to refer to a person of unknown sex b. *If anybody comes, tell her. feminine her is not used to refer to a person of unknown sex Example of collective masculine: French (6) a.