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This paper examines the gender assignment rules that apply to city names in the history of Spanish, relying for the first time on extensive corpus-based material. The empirical data show that gender assignment changed from a referential principle that consistently assigned city names to the feminine (due to the feminine basic level noun for ‘city’) to a phonologically driven assignment rule, with city names ending in -a generally being assigned to the feminine (e.g. Barcelona) and those ending in -o or -C to the masculine (e.g. Toledo, Madrid). However, the overall picture is much more complicated than previously suggested in the literature since there is still a high degree of gender variation in Modern Spanish. The use of the feminine is still possible in city names ending in -o or -C. Interestingly, the change from referential to phonological gender assignment occurs first within the NP (mainly with quantifiers such as tod- o/-a ‘all-m/-f’). It is in this morphosyntactic context that city names with final -a most commonly shift from the feminine to the masculine gender. This case of “evasive gender” will be discussed from a typological perspective.

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This paper provides evidence that human unique nouns such as king constitute a peripheral group of lexemes within the word class of common nouns. In semantic definite contexts, they semantically resemble proper names with respect to monorefentiality and can therefore morphosyntactically behave like personal names. The properhood of inherently unique nouns has remained elusive in reference grammars and historical grammars of Romance languages. Different lines of diachronic and synchronic evidence support the properhood of human unique nouns: Differential object marking in Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, and Sicilian, possessive constructions in Old French, article-drop in unmodified prepositional phrases in Romanian, and proprial article in Old Romanian. By contrast, in Balearic Catalan, human and inanimate unique nouns morphosyntactically deviate both from proper names and non-unique nouns with respect to definite article forms. The findings reveal that properhood of human unique nouns is in line with an implicational scale based on the notion of dimensions of knowledge.