Agostinho Miguel Magalhães Salgueiro
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1077-9911 
CELGA-ILTEC, University of Coimbra

https://doi.org/10.4467/K7501.45/22.23.18075

One of the most common questions regarding the proper use of a toponym in Portuguese is related with the (i) obligation, (ii) possibility or (iii) interdiction to employ an article as a toponymic gender marker. Every Portuguese speaker acknowledges that the only possible position for an article attributing gender to a place name is to its left; also, it is well known that a mandatory or possible gender article in Portuguese is never a constituent of the place name it precedes. Nevertheless, language users still struggle to draw general rules that allow them to better understand the grammaticality of gender articles preceding toponyms. As one would expect, the less familiar a toponym is to a speaker, the harder it becomes for them to predict its gender value. In Portuguese, toponyms derived from nouns (synchronically transparent place names, mainly) are the ones commonly labeled as more prone to be preceded by an article, but no extensive research has ever been done to evaluate if this assumption is, in any way, corroborated by user-based data or by data extracted from official toponymic resources. In this paper, considering data from the official resource for Portuguese toponymy, the Vocabulário Toponímico, a set of rules is drawn describing some mandatory, possible or unauthorized interactions between gender articles and toponyms.

Keywords Portuguese toponymy, grammatical gender, toponymic gender-labeling, Vocabulário Toponímico