gender (n.)

A GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY used for the analysis of WORD-CLASSES displaying such CONTRASTS as masculine (m, masc, MASC), feminine (f, F, fem, FEM) and neuter (n, neut, NEUT), animate and inanimate, etc. Discussion of this concept in LINGUISTICS has generally focused upon the need to distinguish natural gender, where items refer to the sex of real-world entities, and grammatical gender, which has nothing to do with sex, but which has an important role in signalling grammatical relationships between words in a SENTENCE (ADJECTIVES agreeing with NOUNS, etc.). The gender SYSTEMS of French, German, Latin, etc., are grammatical, as shown by the FORM of the ARTICLE (e.g. le v. la) or of the noun (e.g. nouns ending in -a are feminine). Grammatical gender is not a feature of English, though some parts of the language can be analyzed in such terms (e.g. the correlation between PRONOUNS, he/she co-occurring with who/whose, etc., whereas it co-occurs with which). English gender contrasts are on the whole natural, viz. he refers to male people, animals, etc. The few cases of other kinds of usage (e.g. a ship being referred to as she) pose interesting problems which have attracted considerable discussion in linguistics.