Contribución al estudio histórico de la variación del género gramatical de los sustantivos abstractos en -or del español

Gender variation of -ornouns in the history of Spanish language, the conditioning motivations of the generic variation remain to be defined. For etymological, semantic and dialectal reasons abstract nouns ending in -orform a particular lexical class in the nominal domain. The present article takes into account internal and external factors, some of them not considered before, in order to determine their impact on these gender alternations. Methodologically, data are extracted from both a documentary and a literary corpus and iscom-posed of more than 12,500 cases of variable gender nouns. The analysis corroborates the impact of oriental varieties on the evolution of the feminine nouns and sheds light on the hypothesis advanced by previous research on this topic. Furthermore, this study provides new insights on the chronology of this morphosyntactic change, the significance of “lexical diffusion” in this context of variation and change and the role of other derivative suffixes.