PERSONAL PRONOUNS AND GRAMMATICAL GENDER IN SPANISH

The notion of gender as an inherent feature of nouns and pronouns manifested through agreement causes problems in the characterisation and classification of personal pronouns in Spanish grammar according to this category. Our approach is based on the identification of these problems, on a critical reflection on this conception of gender and on an alterna-tive consideration of gender as a category that provides information, in the field of virtual designation, on the delimitation of classes -not always related to sex- included in an-other of greater extension. Finally, we address the basic objective of this article: the charac-terisation and classification of personal pronouns in Spanish according to this alternative notion of grammatical gender.