摘要：This paper explores the syntactic nature of gender in Galician nouns. Gender in Galician is neither a morpheme nor a kind of meaning, but an inherent morphosyntactic category whose function it is to establish agreement structures. This fact introduces gender into the syntactic representation of words, making it necessary to consider it an inflectional category. In some nouns which denote animate beings, such as neno ~ nena (‘boy’ ~ ‘girl’) or lobo ~ loba (‘male wolf’ ~ ‘female wolf’), there is a productive link between syntactic information about grammatical gender and conceptual information about sexual identity that might be formulated in terms of rules of lexical derivation, yet I argue that this does not affect the basically syntactic and inflectional nature of the category. In support of this position I analyze the behaviour of gender under so-called gender neutralization, which I show to be a semantic, not a syntactic or inflectional process.
