Logos

CATEGORYcat.gender

gender

The classification of nouns into a small closed set of agreement classes, whether organized around biological sex or around other, more arbitrary groupings.

Gender classifies nouns into a limited set of classes that other words agree with, a phenomenon that includes both the familiar two- or three-way systems organized loosely around biological sex and the larger noun-class systems, found in some language families, that can run to a dozen or more classes with no such organizing principle. A system can be organized around natural criteria, in which the class tracks a real property of the referent such as sex or humanness, around formal criteria such as phonological shape, or around some mix of the two with a residue of forms whose class must simply be memorized. Because the criteria that organize gender differ so much from one family of languages to another, no single conceptual scale underlies every attested system the way one does for a dimension like number; what is shared across systems is only the mechanism, agreement, by which the class of a noun becomes visible on the other words that combine with it.

statusstatus
documentedasserted, and the sources agree
provenanceprovenance
authoredwritten for Logos, from first principles
derivation statusderivation_status
unstatednobody has said whether it follows from anything
saliencesalience
No salience. Where no frequency source applies the object carries none, rather than a default or a guess (03-schema.md §3.5).
aliasesaliases
  • metalanguagenoun class
sourcessources
  • SOURCEUniMorph Schema (Sylak-Glassman 2016)src.unimorph-schemano page in v1

What kind of category this is

category.classification

A category is either a question or one of its answers. Which it is decides what else may be said about it.

tiertier
dimensiona question a language can answer: it has a set of values
comparabilitycomparability
comparativethe same category is compared across languages
scopescope
No language scope. The field is null and that is an assertion, not a silence: a category is language-particular exactly when it names one.
groupsgroups
  • nominalit lives on nouns and the phrases they head
  • verbalit lives on verbs
orderedordered
the values are a set, and their order is arbitrary

The values this dimension admits

category.values

One admits edge per value. A dimension with no values is a question nobody has answered.

This dimension declares no order. Listed alphabetically, which is a display choice and not a fact about the values.

Everything joined to this object

One group per typed edge, in both directions. A1b guarantees no object node is an orphan, so this is the whole navigation: an object with no edges would have failed the build rather than reached this page.

What this object is a kind of

Walking this object's own `is-a` edges: what it is a kind of. Several branches from one object are several classification axes, not competing supertypes.

objects
1
places drawn
1
multi-parent
None in this view. This subgraph happens to be a tree, which the explorer draws as one without assuming it is one.
  • CATEGORYgendercat.genderCATEGORY

    The classification of nouns into a small closed set of agreement classes, whether organized around biological sex or around other, more arbitrary groupings.

Siblings are listed by name, then by id to break ties. That is a display choice made here and not an order the graph asserts.

Fan-out per dimension

A4

One row per dimension, largest first. That is a display order, not a verdict: 03-schema.md declares no threshold above which fan-out is too much, so this reports the count and grades nothing.

  • case13 values
  • mood8 values
  • voice8 values
  • aspect7 values
  • aktionsart6 values
  • number6 values
  • person6 values
  • tense6 values
  • comparison4 values
  • evidentiality4 values
  • gender4 values
  • politeness4 values
  • valency4 values
  • animacy3 values
  • definiteness3 values
  • deixis3 values
  • finiteness2 values
  • information structure2 values
  • interrogativity2 values
  • polarity2 values
  • switch-reference2 values

What kinds of this object there are

Walking the `is-a` edges that point at this object: what kinds of it there are. An object reachable two ways is drawn in both places and is still one object.

objects
1
places drawn
1
multi-parent
None in this view. This subgraph happens to be a tree, which the explorer draws as one without assuming it is one.
  • CATEGORYgendercat.genderCATEGORY

    The classification of nouns into a small closed set of agreement classes, whether organized around biological sex or around other, more arbitrary groupings.

Siblings are listed by name, then by id to break ties. That is a display choice made here and not an order the graph asserts.

has-a

edges.has-a

the parent carries this

these carry this object

derives

edges.derives

the why-chain

derived by