What is feminine gender?

Feminine gender is a grammatical gender that

• marks nouns that have human or animal female referents, and
• often marks nouns that have referents that do not carry distinctions of sex.

• la mujer ‘the woman’
• la gallina ‘the hen’
• la mesa ‘the table’

• What is grammatical gender?

Hartmann and Stork 1972 93

Mish 1991 456

Context for this page:

• Concept module: feminine gender
• In overview module: Glossary (Linguistics): F
• In modular book: Glossary of linguistic terms, by Eugene E. Loos (general editor), Susan Anderson (editor), Dwight H., Day, Jr. (editor), Paul C. Jordan (editor), and J. Douglas Wingate (editor)
• In bookshelf: Linguistics

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 5 January 2004

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