View Chapters

Book: The Five-Minute Linguist

Chapter: 10. What is Grammatical Gender?

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.38129

Blurb:

Languages have ‘natural gender’ if animate males are assigned the masculine, animate females the feminine, and inanimate objects are assigned the neuter gender. Languages have ‘formal gender’ if they assign a gender to nouns arbitrarily. But is formal gender completely arbitrary? Some argue that the gendering of nouns has cognitive implications for speakers.

Chapter Contributors