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Preliminary Recommendations

Gender

Attribute Value Sp. example Sp. tag
Gender masculine (el) libro masc
feminine (la) casa fem
neuter
common (el/la) responsable *
l-spec transart el area yes

The value neuter is not pertinent to Spanish: we have no neuter nouns.

There are nouns in Spanish which could be valued as common since they can be both masculine and feminine. However, in EUROTRA there is no such value: instead we leave the attribute Gender un-valued at the lexical level. It is the grammar that fills this value via unification, that is, any noun with its Gender attribute un-valued will unify with both feminine and masculine articles.

A special case in Spanish with respect to gender is that of feminine nouns beginning with stressed `a' (having `h' before or not). These nouns take, when in the singular, the masculine allomorph of the (in)definite article if this immediately precedes the noun:

``el aguila calva'' (`the(masc,sing) bald(fem,sing) eagle')
``las aguilas calvas'' (`the(fem,plu) bald(fem,plu) eagles')
``la gran aguila'' (`the(fem,sing) great eagle')

In order to avoid problems of concord, we add a new Boolean attribute (transart) which serves to distinguish these nouns: when its value is yes, a feature rule ensures the marking of the article such that the relevant transducer will change its gender value:

Attribute Value Sp. example Sp. tag
transart yes el area yes
no el niño no

This transart attribute could be treated as a language-specific value for the attribute Gender.



next up previous contents
Next: Number Up: Application to Spanish Previous: Type