Original scientific paper

The syntactic nature of grammatical gender

Tatjana Pišković orcid.org/0000-0002-7304-2696 ; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu

Abstract

Whenever some aspect of grammatical gender is discussed, the following definition of Charles Hockett (1958) is cited: “Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words.” Thus gender is defined as a category with a syntactic realization which is not revealed in the noun itself but rather is reflected in the behavior of the noun’s gender-variable modifiers. This paper will attempt to prove that a definition of grammatical gender in terms of agreement is the best way of describing this category’s nature. There have been some attempts to revise and/or disqualify Hockett’s grammatical gender definition, and so we will try to disprove any alternative definitions of gender by using examples from the Croatian language. We will argue that non-syntactic definitions of grammatical gender are extremely limited and can be supported only in terms of a deficient corpus of nouns in a language. This calls for an attempt to challenge the prevailing assumption that gender is a morphological or derivational category and to prove that a universal explanation of grammatical gender must be syntactic.

Keywords

nominal classification; grammatical gender; declension type; agreement; agreement classes

Hrčak ID:

75521

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/75521

Publication date:

2.1.2012.

Article data in other languages: croatian

Visits: 3.355 *