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Does Spanish have a neuter gender | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 41 of 41 26 August 2012 at 8:37pm | IP Logged |
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OK, I hope this can be an appropriate 'closure' for the thread with the few remaining clarifications...
@R. review: Exactly, I meant that the notions of feminine and masculine make sense for anything that has males and females, and nothing else. But we're stuck with absurd genders in many languages so that's the hand we have to play with. As for grammatical categories... it is true, as tractor points out, that we can debate if a verb acting as a noun is still a verb or whatever else... however, in Spanish, grammar categories are quite rigid and it is usually quite clear from morphology (presence of affixes or lack thereof) whatever the main role of any word is. When in doubt, as there are always non-obvious cases, any dictionary that's any good should dispel your doubts about grammatical categories of words right away. So... 'mejor', etc. are adjectives, and when you put 'lo' in front of it, the whole thing becomes a 'nominal syntagm' i.e. a group of words that acts as a single noun would. Most natives will either be oblivious about the whole shebang or won't feel the need to be so explicit if they know about it. Sorry about that. Conclusion: what the RAE guys means by 'there are no neutral nouns' is that, in Spanish, no SINGLE WORDS THAT ARE NOUNS (by themselves) are neutral, i.e. if 'lo mejor' is neutral then you can deduce that 'mejor' can't be a noun if you didn't know it already. WRT to agreement between both sides of a copula (ser, estar, parecer) as proof reader I know there are some restrictions, but I can't think of a simple way to sum it all up right now. It looks like it's 'free for all' for a good reason: it almost is :) 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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