New answers tagged nouns
1
Gender (or noun class) and Number (which includes singular, dual, paucal, and plural) are two of the possible properties of Entities, the things that Nouns refer to.
Other common noun categories include Person (first, second, third, fourth, etc.), Case (nominative, genitive, ergative, locative, etc.), Animacy (human, animal, etc.), Specificity (or ...
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Plural is a grammaticalized semantic concept – more than one. It might be signaled by an affix or other morphological process, or by adding a separate grammatical word indicating "plural". Gender is fundamentally about a system of morphological classification of nouns into "types". A language might for example distinguish masculine and ...
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In general, gender is an inherent property of a lexeme, while number is something that can easily be changed. For example, Latin mensae "tables (plural)" is a perfectly normal inflection of mensa "table", but *mensus "table (masculine)" is very weird.
Now, this line is sometimes blurred—gender and number interact in interesting ...
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