Gender (grammar)

STUB

Gender is an inflectional dimension used on referring expressions to designate semantic class membership of their denotatum.

• "By the term gender is here meant any grammatical class-division presenting some analogy to the distinction in the Aryan languages between masculine, feminine and neuter, whether the division be based on the natural division into the two sexes, or on that between animate and inanimate, or on something else." (Jespersen 1924:226)

Comments

Traditionally, the distinction between natural gender (which designates the biological sex of animate referents) and grammatical gender (categorisations which depend on other, culturally specific criteria) has attracted much attention.

List of genders

• masculine
• feminine
• neuter

Synonym

• noun class

See also

• classifier
• gender (sociolinguistics)

Origin

genus Lat.

The term 'gerder' itself derives from an extremely general word meaning 'class' or 'kind'.

References

• Corbett 1991
• Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The philosophy of grammar. London: Allen & Unwin.
• Lyons, John. 1968. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Other languages

• Chinese 性范畴
• French genre
• German Genus, Geschlecht
• Russian род