ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the basic properties of the two inflectional categories in Spanish nominal phrases: gender and number. Gender in Spanish classifies nouns in two or three classes, and number relates nouns to a singular or plural quantity. From an analytical point of view, the chapter presents two possible ways of representing gender: as symmetric or asymmetric. In the first representation, nouns may have two separate but equal genders, whereas in the second one, one of the gender features is marked and the other one is unmarked or default. The chapter presents the different possible mappings of abstract inflectional features to syntactic structure and to morphemes. It then provides a basic description of the morphological patterns observed for gender and how the notion of animacy affects the distribution of gender marking. Spanish has two genders that correspond to different morphemes; this partition appears on nouns, adjectives, determiners and personal pronouns.
