Proposal for the delimitation of criteria for the assignment of grammatical gender to lexical neologisms from English

Abstract

We intend to provide new guidelines to define the criteria used to assign gender to words taken from other languages that lack this grammatical category. We will present the conclusions of the analysis of more than 600 different contexts with nouns from the English language recently incorporated, with wide use and diffusion, into the Spanish language and that have not been orthographically adapted to this language. In some cases, spelling variants of English words have been detected, proof of their formal instability in Spanish and of their neologicity. The contexts with neological anglicisms have been extracted from 127 different newspapers. For the analysis of the gender assigned to the nouns we have used two criteria: 1) the syntactic collocational or combinatory criterion. This criterion is based in the concordance of the noun with other words, which appear in the context, of other linguistic categories and various endings. Such concordances allow us to determine the gender (masculine or feminine) that has been assigned to the neological noun, and 2) the semantic criterion, based on the recurrence of the nature of the referent. This was determined after finding the Spanish equivalent of the referent or by a defining paraphrase of it. When it comes to lexicalized nouns in English, the definitions registered in dictionaries of these languages have been used. The sum of these criteria has allowed us to draw the conclusions that we will present in this article. We intend to provide the establishment of the guidelines that can be seen to have been followed to morphologically assign the gender (masculine or feminine) to these English nouns which are used as neological voices in Spanish contexts.