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When nouns deviate from the rules for gender, there is usually an etymological explanation: problema ("problem") is masculine in Spanish because it was derived from a Greek noun of the neuter gender, whereas foto ("photo") and radio ("broadcast signal") are feminine because they are clippings of fotografía and radiodifusión respectively, both ...
Often the gender distinction for these neutral nouns is established by inserting the word "male" or "female". [13] Sam is a male nurse. No, he is not my boyfriend; he is just a male friend. I have three female cousins and two male cousins. Rarely, nouns illustrating things with no gender are referred to with a gendered pronoun to convey ...
Nouns seem to possess a well defined but covert system of grammatical gender. We may call a noun masculine, feminine or neuter depending on the pronouns which it selects in the singular. Mass or non-count nouns (such as frost, fog, water, love) are called neuter because they select the pronoun it. Count nouns divide into masculine and feminine.
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
Danish (Danish has four gendered pronouns, but only two grammatical genders in the sense of noun classes. See Gender in Danish and Swedish.) Dutch (The masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by some when using pronouns, and in Southern-Dutch varieties. See Gender in Dutch ...
Dual-gender masculine/feminine nouns (e.g., actor, doctor) Dual-gender masculine/neuter nouns (e.g., bull, brother) Dual-gender feminine/neuter nouns (e.g., cow, sister, ship) Triple-gender nouns (e.g., baby, dog) These classes are not equally common. For instance, single-gender neuter nouns account for a large majority of common nouns while ...
The term "gender", as used by some linguists, refers to a noun-class system composed with two, three, or four classes, particularly if the classification is semantically based on a distinction between masculine and feminine. Genders are then considered a sub-class of noun classes.
It is a meaning relation in which a phrase "stands in" for (expresses the same content as) another where the meaning is recoverable from the context. [4] In English, pronouns mostly function as pro-forms, but there are pronouns that are not pro-forms and pro-forms that are not pronouns. [5]: 239 Pronouns can be pro-forms for non-noun phrases.