Aportaciones a la historia del género ambiguo en español: a propósito del sustantivo deverbal tizne

Abstract

The New Grammar of the Spanish Language (2009) defines ambiguous nouns in terms of gender as those that refer to the same inanimate entity, both male and female, «but do not usually designate sexed beings». Some can be analyzed as late developments, after the restructuring of gender that followed the loss of neutral and casual flexion, together with verbs roots that show similar vacillations to those originated after the evolutionary processes that emerged in the transition from Latin into Romance languages. Among them we find the case of the word tizne, whose variations throughout the history of the Spanish language will be the fundamental object of the present study.