Mass/countness and gender in Asturian
Having shown at the end of Chapter 4 that mass/count may be encoded in the gender system, this chapter analyses in depth one Romance variety where the interaction of the mass/count distinction with gender presents itself in a distinctly intricate way, viz. Central Asturian. This features a ‘neuter’ agreement that has been variously analysed as the exponent of a value of the morphosyntactic categories gender or number, or as manifesting the value of some other, purely semantic, category. Complementing the evidence with new data, the chapter concludes that the most economical analysis is one according to which the Asturian neuter is a gender value, but within a second gender system. In this, Asturian parallels a few far-off languages which, in recent studies in linguistic typology, have been argued to possess two concurrent systems for noun classification.