What is grammatical gender?

Definition
	Grammatical gender is a noun class system, composed of two or three classes, whose nouns that have human male and female referents tend to be in separate classes. Other nouns that are classified in the same way in the language may not be classed by any correlation with natural sex distinctions.

Kinds
	Here are some kinds of grammatical gender:
	What is feminine gender? What is masculine gender? What is neuter gender?

Generic
	Grammatical gender is a kind of
	What is a noun class?

Sources
	Hartmann and Stork 1972 93
	Foley, W. and Van Valin 1984 325
	Mish 1991 510
	Crystal 1985 133
	Dixon 1968 105
	Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik 1985 314

Context for this page:

Concept module: gender
In overview module: Glossary (Linguistics): G
In modular book: Glossary of linguistic terms, by Eugene E. Loos (general editor), Susan Anderson (editor), Dwight H., Day, Jr. (editor), Paul C. Jordan (editor), and J. Douglas Wingate (editor)
In bookshelf: Linguistics

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 5 January 2004

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