In literature, gender can be used to "animate and personify inanimate nouns".Īmong these, role 2 is probably the most important in everyday usage.Grammatical gender "can be a valuable tool of disambiguation", rendering clarity about antecedents or homophones.In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express gender distinctions in animate beings.
Three possible functions of grammatical gender include: If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations. Gender class may be marked on the noun itself, but will also always be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners, pronouns, numerals, quantifiers, possessives, adjectives, past and passive participles, articles, verbs, adverbs, complementizers, and adpositions. Nouns may be considered the "triggers" of the process, whereas other words will be the "target" of these changes. Gender is considered an inherent quality of nouns, and it affects the forms of other related words, a process called "agreement". Usually each noun is assigned to one of the genders, and few or no nouns can occur in more than one gender. In such a case, the gender assignment can also be influenced by the morphology or phonology of the noun, or in some cases can be apparently arbitrary. the word for "manliness" could be of feminine gender, as it is in French with "masculinité" and "virilité"). However, in most languages, this semantic division is only partially valid, and many nouns may belong to a gender category that contrasts with their meaning (e.g. Such properties include animacy or inanimacy, " humanness" or non-humanness, and biological sex. In other languages, the division into genders usually correlates to some degree, at least for a certain set of nouns (such as those denoting humans), with some property or properties of the things that particular nouns denote. However, the existence of words that denote male and female, such as the difference between "aunt" and "uncle" is not enough to constitute a gender system. In a few languages, the assignment of any particular noun (i.e., nominal lexeme, that set of noun forms inflectable from a common lemma) to one grammatical gender is solely determined by that noun's meaning (or attributes, like biological sex, humanness, or animacy). "woman" is usually feminine), or may be arbitrary. Spanish nouns have two genders: masculine and feminine, represented here by the nouns gato and gata, respectively.ĭepending on the language and the word, this assignment might bear some relationship with the meaning of the noun (e.g. For example, in Spanish, determiners, adjectives, and pronouns change their form depending on the noun to which they refer. The grammatical gender of a noun affects the form of other words related to it.
Ĭommon gender divisions include masculine and feminine masculine, feminine, and neuter or animate and inanimate. Languages with grammatical gender usually have two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20.
According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behaviour of associated words." Overview According to one estimate, gender is used in approximately half of the world's languages. Whereas some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", others use different definitions for each many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex or gender. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender the values present in a given language (of which there are usually two or three) are called the genders of that language. In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns.
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