El género gramatical en español: historia de un concepto

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the evolution of the concept of grammatical gender in Spanish from a lexicographical perspective. Starting from the idea that gender in Spanish helps to express agreement relationships with determiners and other kinds of words that accompany the noun in the nominal group, I will try to understand how the Latin word genus, generis developed into Castilian género ‘gender’. It concerns a conceptual transposition that for the explanation of the word from a semantic point of view, has always taken into account its relationship with the (biological) concept of sex. This view emerges in the first language dictionaries, which allow for a grammatical specialization of the use of género, and persists until the latest, 23rd, edition of the academic dictionary, from 2014. Through the analysis of the definitions offered by the Spanish dictionaries, and with the support of some grammars, I will try to show that the use of the noun género with a grammatical meaning appears late in the wordlists of our language and that, from the first records onward, it has never been detached from its primitive meanings, closer to the concepts 'class', 'type', 'species', 'category' (common since Nebrija) from which the one of interest here also derived. Because, as the dictionaries show, this meaning arose to classify the category of the noun according to the sex of its referent or to establish syntactic relationships of agreement with other classes of words, without ever losing its morphematic character in nouns that designate species with a procreative function.