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Grammatical Gender Systems: A Linguist's Assessment

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Abstract

The notion of grammatical gender is defined and criteria for assigning nouns to genders are discussed, in particular semantic and formal criteria. Data from child language acquisition show that both semantic and formal criteria can be the basis of children's overgeneralizations, although the question of to what extent more opaque semantic or formal gender assignment criteria are available to children remains to be ascertained.

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  1. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Inselstrasse 22, D-04103, Leipzig, Germany

    Bernard Comrie

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  1. Bernard Comrie
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Correspondence to Bernard Comrie.

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Comrie, B. Grammatical Gender Systems: A Linguist's Assessment. J Psycholinguist Res 28, 457–466 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023212225540

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