The morphological gender in the Portuguese noun cal

• Autor(a) principal: Trindade, Milena Guirelli
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Entrepalavras
• Texto Completo: http://www.entrepalavras.ufc.br/revista/index.php/Revista/article/view/2508
• topic: Morphological gender. Grammatical gender oscillation. Portuguese language. Word endings.; Gênero morfológico. Hesitação de gênero. Língua portuguesa. Terminações.

The present article seeks to investigate the phenomenon of the morphological gender in the Portuguese noun cal, which is often considered as feminine by grammars, while it is generally used both as feminine and as masculine by Portuguese speakers. Thus, since cal is one of the few exceptions of words ending in -l that are not masculine (SAID ALI, 1923, p. 63), we analyzed diachronically in order to verify the motivations for the grammatical gender oscillation in this word. Thereby, we considered the definitions of grammatical gender oscillation and change formulated by Gouveia (2005) and we investigated the word since its correspondent in ancient Greek and Latin, based on authors such as Bailly (1950) and Gaffiot (1934). Furthermore, we also verified how the gender of this lexical item was fixed in other Romance languages, such as Spanish and Galician.