Gender category

Author: Kurt Berendt
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: The category of gender is so controversial that it appears both confusing and alluring among all grammatical categories. This book collects variants from over 200 languages, attempting to derive a universal pattern while also providing a detailed analysis of specific languages to give readers an in-depth and concrete understanding of gender categories. The differences in gender categories are typically reflected in gender, but some language systems express them through other oppositions, such as human vs. non-human, animate vs. inanimate, etc. The syntactic manifestations are equally surprising; in addition to verbs and adjectives showing gender, numerals, adpositions, and adverbs also exhibit agreement relations. In some languages, it is the agreement relations that determine the quantity of gender. Meanwhile, this research also raises some new questions, such as "blended" nouns that can adopt two or more agreement forms. The author incorporates these diverse variations into the universal pattern and suggests their roles in linguistic evolution.