Dealing with the Neutral Gender in Ibero-Romance Languages

Abstract

In traditional grammar, the concept of neuter gender barely makes reference to the morphosemantic gender, having Latin as a model, for which Ibero-Romance languages do not theoretically have such a gender, but at the same time grammars refer to the neutre gender when referring to Galician-Portuguese forms isto, isso, aquilo, tudo, or the Spanish article lo In this paper we are going to show that these last forms are indeed neuter gender, but in the syntactic sense, which involves that they do not have a referent, unlike morphosemantic neutrals.