GENUL GRAMATICAL – O CATEGORIE GRAMATICALĂ ÎNTRE TRADIŢIE ŞI MODERNITATE
THE GRAMMATICAL GENDER – A GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: The grammatical gender concept is based on the biological existence of the sexes, but it doesn’t get confused with them, and it represents a grammatical category specific to nouns. In Romanian, the syntactic manifestations of gender are those which determine the classification of a noun into a certain gender, and the form of the noun may be checked by selecting certain adjective contexts (adjectives, participle adjectives, adjective pronouns), for a noun goes with maximum two of the four types of adjective contexts (acest ~; această ~; acești ~; aceste ~) [this ~; these ~;]. Consequently, masculine nouns go only with the acest ~, acești ~ contexts, while feminine nouns go only with the această ~, aceste ~ contexts, and neuter nouns only with the acest ~, aceste ~ contexts. There are practical difficulties in three cases: 1. nouns included in the personal gender based on the [+Human] / [- Human] opposition; 2. defective nouns which, due to their incomplete paradigm in terms of number and gender non-specificity, are considered to belong to the masculine-neuter archigender or the feminine-neuter archigender; and 3. the common gender which belongs to nouns whose gender, although not differentiated, may be determined based on the context. Discussing these cases and the problems generated by the classification of gender into different relationship grammatical categories will be the main objectives of our paper.

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