Overview
Languages with grammatical gender usually take two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20.
Common gender divisions put masculine together with feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate.
Depending on the language and the word, this assignment might bear some relationship with the meaning of the noun e.g. "woman" is usually feminine, or may be arbitrary.
In a few languages, the gender assignment of nouns is solely determined by their meaning or attributes, like biological sex, humanness, or animacy.
In other languages, the division into genders usually correlates to some degree, at least for a certain mark of nouns such(a) as those denoting humans, with some property or properties of the matters that specific nouns denote. such(a) properties include animacy or inanimacy, "humanness" or non-humanness, and biological sex.
However, in most languages, this semantic division is only partially valid, and many nouns may belong to a gender generation that contrasts with their meaning e.g. the word for "manliness" could be of feminine 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.
Usually each noun is assigned to one of the genders, and few or no nouns can arise in more than one gender.
Gender is considered an inherent quality of nouns, and it affects the forms of other related words, a process called "agreement". Nouns may be considered the "triggers" of the process, whereas other words will be the "target" of these changes.
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. Gender a collection of things sharing a common features may be marked on the noun itself, but will also always be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. whether the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and planned may feature similar alternations.
Three possible functions of grammatical gender include:
Among these, role 2 is probably the most important in everyday usage.[] Languages with gender distinction generally have fewer cases of ambiguity concerning, for example, pronominal reference. In the English phrase "a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain" only context tells us if the relative clause which I maintain allocated to the whole garden or just the flowerbed. In German, gender distinction prevents such ambiguity. The word for "flowerbed" Blumenbeet is neuter, whereas that for "garden" Garten is masculine. Hence, if a neuter relative pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "flowerbed", and if a masculine pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "garden". Because of this, languages with gender distinction can often use pronouns where in English a noun would have to be repeated in layout to avoid confusion. It does not, however, support in cases where the words are of the same grammatical gender. Then again, there are often several synonymous nouns of different grammatical gender to option from to avoid this.
Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish pot "pot" and peau "skin" are homophones /po/, but disagree in gender: vs. .
Common systems of gender contrast include:[]
Nouns that denote specifically male persons or animals are normally of masculine gender; those that denote specifically female persons or animals are normally of feminine gender; and nouns that denote something that does not have all sex, or do not specify the sex of their referent, have come to belong to one or other of the genders, in a way that mayarbitrary. Examples of languages with such a system include most of the contemporary Romance languages, the Baltic languages, the Celtic languages, some Indo-Aryan languages e.g., Hindi, and the Afroasiatic languages.
This is similar to systems with a masculine–feminine contrast, except that there is a third usable gender, so nouns with sexless or unspecified-sex referents may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter. There are alsoexceptional nouns whose gender does not follow the denoted sex, such as the German Mädchen, meaning "girl", which is neuter. This is because it is actually a diminutive of "Magd" and all diminutive forms with the suffix -chen are neuter. Examples of languages with such a system include later forms of below, Sanskrit, some Germanic languages, most Slavic languages, a few Romance languages including Romanian and Asturian, Marathi, Latin, and Greek.
Here nouns that denote below. innovative examples include Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe.
Here a masculine–feminine–neuter system ago existed, but the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost in nouns they have merged into what is called common gender, though not in pronouns that can operate under natural gender. Thus nouns denoting people are usually of common gender, whereas other nouns may be of either gender. Examples include below.
Some gender contrasts are referred to as classes; for some examples, see below. A human–non-human or "rational–non-rational" distinction is also found in below.
Grammatical systems such as gender do not ]. However, they do slightly affect the way we think: for instance, it has been consistently exposed that gender causes a number of cognitive effects. For example, when native speakers of gendered languages are known to imagine an inanimate thing speaking, whether its voice is male or female tends to correspond to the grammatical gender of the object in their language. This has been observed for speakers of Spanish, French, and German, among others.
Caveats of this research include the possibility of subjects' "using grammatical gender as a strategy for performing the task", and the fact that even for inanimate objects the gender of nouns is not always random. For example, in Spanish, female gender is often attributed to objects that are "used by women, natural, round, or light" and male gender to objects "used by men, artificial, angular, or heavy." apparent failures to reproduce the issue for German speakers has also led to a proposal that the issue is restricted to languages with a two-gender system, possibly because such languages are inclined towards a greater correspondence between grammatical and natural gender.
Another kind of test asks people to describe a noun, and attempts to degree whether it takes on gender-specific connotations depending on the speaker's native language. For example, one discussing found that German speakers describing a bridge German: Brücke, f. more often used the words 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'pretty', and 'slender', while Spanish speakers, whose word for bridge is masculine , m., used 'big', 'dangerous', 'strong', and 'sturdy' more often. However, studies of this kind have been criticised on various grounds and yield an unclear sample of results overall.
A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic attribute of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, although in some instances a noun can be placed in a particular a collection of things sharing a common attribute based purely on its grammatical behavior. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each.
Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex, such as when an animate–inanimate distinction is made. Note, however, that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus also the root of genre which originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning.
A classifier, or measure word, is a word or morpheme used in some languages together with a noun, principally to makes numbers andother determiners to be applied to the noun. They are not regularly used in English or other European languages, although they parallel the use of words such as pieces and head in phrases like "three pieces of paper" or "thirty head of cattle". They are a prominent feature of East Asian languages, where it is for common for all nouns to require a classifier when being quantified—for example, the equivalent of "three people" is often "three classifier people". A more general type of classifier classifier handshapes can be found in sign languages.
Classifiers can be considered similar to genders or noun classes, in that a language which uses classifiers normally has a number of different ones, used with different sets of nouns. These sets depend largely on properties of the things that the nouns denote for example, a particular classifier may be used for long thin objects, another for flat objects, another for people, another for abstracts, etc., although sometimes a noun is associated with a particular classifier more by convention than for any apparent reason. However it is also possible for a given noun to be available with any of several classifiers; for example, the Mandarin Chinese classifier 个 個 is frequently used as an option to various more specific classifiers.