The manifestation of grammatical gender
Grammatical gender can be realized as inflection in addition to can be conditioned by other types of inflection, particularly number inflection, where the singular-plural contrast can interact with gender inflection.
The grammatical gender of a noun manifests itself in two principal ways: in the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, in addition to in modifications of other related words agreement.
Grammatical gender manifests itself when words related to a noun like determiners, pronouns or adjectives conform their earn inflect according to the gender of noun they refer to agreement. The parts of speech affected by gender agreement, the circumstances in which it occurs, and the way words are marked for gender recast between languages. Gender inflection may interact with other grammatical categories like number or case. In some languages the declension sample followed by the noun itself will be different for different genders.
The gender of a noun may impact the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, particularly the way in which the noun See, which has two possible genders: when this is the masculine meaning "lake" its genitive singular form is , but when this is the feminine meaning "sea", the genitive is , because feminine nouns do non take the genitive -s.
Gender is sometimes reflected in other ways. In initial mutation, where the first consonant of a word reorient into another inconditions. Gender is one of the factors that can cause one form of mutation soft mutation. For instance, the word merch "girl" changes into ferch after the mab "son" submits unchanged. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way.
Additionally, in numerous languages, gender is often closely correlated with the basic unmodified form § Form-based morphological criteria, below.
Agreement, or concord, is a grammatical process in whichwords modify their form so that values of certain grammatical categories match those of related words. Gender is one of the categories which frequently require agreement. In this case, nouns may be considered the "triggers" of the process, because they have an inherent gender, whereas related words that change their form to match the gender of the noun can be considered the "target" of these changes.
These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners, pronouns, numerals, quantifiers, possessives, adjectives, past and passive participles, verbs, adverbs, complementizers, and adpositions. Gender class may be marked on the noun itself, but can also be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. whether the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and sent may feature similar alternations.
As an example, we consider el masculine, and la feminine. Thus, in "natural gender", nouns referring to sexed beings who are male beings carry the masculine article, and female beings the feminine article agreement.
In "grammatical" gender, almost words that end in , and are marked with "feminine" articles, while any others use the "generic" or "masculine" articles.
In some languages the gender is distinguished only in singular number but not in plural. In terms of linguistic roter, , but only one in plural Bulgarian червени, German [all examples intend "red"]. As a consequence pluralia tantum nouns lacking a singular form cannot be assigned a gender. Example with Bulgarian: клещи , "pincers", гащи , "pants", очила , "spectacles", хриле , "gills".
Other languages, e.g. Serbo-Croatian, allow doubly marked forms both for number and gender. In these languages, regarded and included separately. noun has a definite gender no matter the number. For example, "children" is feminine singularia tantum and "door" is neuter pluralia tantum.
Pronouns may agree in gender with the noun or noun phrase to which they refer their antecedent. Sometimes, however, there is no antecedent—the referent of the pronoun is deduced indirectly from the context: this is found with personal pronouns, as well as with indefinite and dummy pronouns
With personal pronouns, the gender of the pronoun is likely to agree with the natural gender of the referent. Indeed, in most European languages, personal pronouns are gendered; for example English the personal pronouns he, she and it are used depending on whether the referent is male, female, or inanimate or non-human; this is in spite of the fact that English does not loosely have grammatical gender. A parallel example is portrayed by the object suffixes of verbs in Arabic, which correspond to thing pronouns, and which also inflect for gender in the second person though not in the first:
Not all languages have gendered pronouns. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is commonly just one word for "he" and "she", like dia in ő in o in hän is used for "he" and "she" and se for "it", but in the colloquial language is usually used for "he" and "she" as well.
For more on these different manner of pronoun, see Third-person pronoun. Issues may occur in languages with gender-specific pronouns in cases when the gender of the referent is unknown or not specified; this is discussed under Gender-neutral language, and in version to English at Singular they.
In some cases the gender of a pronoun is not marked in the form of the pronoun itself, but is marked on other words by way of agreement. Thus the French word for "I" is je, regardless of who is speaking; but this word becomes feminine or masculine depending on the sex of the speaker, as may be reflected through adjective agreement: "I am strong", spoken by a female; the same spoken by a male.
In null-subject languages and in some elliptical expressions in other languages, such agreement may take place even though the pronoun does not in fact appear. For example, in Portuguese:
The two sentences above mean literally "much obliged"; the adjective agrees with the natural gender of the speaker, that is, with the gender of the first adult pronoun which does notexplicitly here.
A dummy pronoun is a type of pronoun used when a particular verb argument such as the subject is nonexistent, but when a acknowledgment to the argument is nevertheless syntactically required. They occur mostly in non-pro-drop languages, such as English because in pro-drop languages the position of the argument can be left empty. Examples in English are the uses of it in "It's raining" and "It's nice to relax."
When a language has gendered pronouns, the use of a particular word as a dummy pronoun may involve the option of a particular gender, even though there is no noun to agree with. In languages with a neuter gender, a neuter pronoun is usually used, as in German "it rains, it's raining", where es is the neuter third grownup singular pronoun. English behaves similarly, because the word it comes from the il means "he", or "it" when referring to masculine nouns; although some languages use the feminine, as in the equivalent hi, which means "she", or "it" when referring to feminine nouns.
A similar, apparently arbitrary gender assignment may need to be made in the effect of quelqu'un "someone", personne "no-one" and quelque chose "something" are all treated as masculine—this is in spite of the fact that the last two correspond to feminine nouns meaning "person", and chose meaning "thing".
For other situations in which such a "default" gender assignment may be required, see § Contextual determination of gender below.
The natural gender of a noun, pronoun or noun phrase is a gender to which it would be expected to belong based on relevant attributes of its referent. Although grammatical gender can coincide with natural gender, it need not.
This usually means masculine or feminine, depending on the referent's sex. For example, in ]
The grammatical gender of a noun does not always coincide with its natural gender. An example of this is the Mädchen "girl"; this is derived from Magd "maiden", umlauted to with the diminutive suffix , and this suffix always enable the noun grammatically neuter. Hence the grammatical gender of is neuter, although its natural gender is feminine because it refers to a female person.
Other examples include:
Normally, such exceptions are a small minority.
When a noun with conflicting natural and grammatical gender is the antecedent of a pronoun, it may not be clear which gender of pronoun to choose. There is a certain tendency to keep the grammatical gender when aback-reference is made, but to switch to natural gender when the source is further away. For example, in German, the sentences "The girl has come domestic from school. She is now doing her homework" can be translated in two ways:
Though thesentence maygrammatically incorrect constructio advertisement sensum, it is common in speech. With one or more intervening sentences, theform becomes even more likely. However, a switch to the natural gender is never possible with articles and attributive pronouns or adjectives. Thus itcan never be right to say "a girl" – with female indefinite article or "this little girl" – with female demonstrative pronoun and adjective.