Special Issue: Grammatical Gender in Romance Languages: Grammatical and Typological Perspectives

Guest Editors: Carmela Tomé Cornejo and Gabriela Mariel Zunino

Extended Deadline for Submissions: August 25, 2025

https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/bore... target="_blank" rel="noopener">Borealis. An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics is receiving submissions for a special issue on Grammatical Gender in Romance Languages: Grammatical and Typological Perspectives.

This volume aims to bring together synchronic studies that explore the nature and functioning of grammatical gender in Romance languages from various theoretical frameworks, with the goal of providing a broad and updated perspective on its characterization and variation within this language family.

Gender is a fundamental category in Romance languages, raising multiple controversial issues, including its grammatical status and its interaction with both linguistic and extralinguistic features. From morphological and syntactic perspectives, discussions have focused on its nature, its impact on the grammatical system of natural languages, noun assignment mechanisms and the classes it can generate, as well as inconsistencies in agreement (Fábregas, 2022, 2024; Kramer, 2020; Mendívil, 2020). At the same time, other approaches have explored the relationship between this grammatical category and cognition (Samuel, Cole & Eacott, 2019), as well as its acquisition in both first and additional languages, contributing to its theoretical characterization (Lohndal & Westergaard, 2021).

In the context of ongoing linguistic change, where various speech communities have begun to use and promote additional gender markers to challenge binarism and the masculinizing bias of generic forms, this special issue aims to deepen the characterization of grammatical gender in different Romance languages, integrating a variationist perspective at both intra-linguistic and inter-linguistic levels.

We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

- Representation of gender in different grammatical models

- Gender and linguistic typology

- Variation and change in the expression of grammatical gender in Romance languages

- Language contact and the influence of other languages on gender expression

- The acquisition of gender in Romance languages and its role in defining gender as a grammatical category

Submission deadline (reminder): August 25, 2025

Articles must follow the Borealis journal guidelines and will undergo a double-blind peer review process. The journal accepts publications in Spanish, Catalan, and English. For more information on submission procedures and editorial guidelines, please visit the https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/bore... target="_blank" rel="noopener">journal’s website.

For inquiries regarding this special issue, please contact the guest editors at the following email addresses:

carmela_tome@usal.es and gmzunino@conicet.gov.ar

We look forward to your contributions.