Masculine Gender ( Concept )
http://purl.org/linguistics/gold/MasculineGender
Thing |_
Abstract |_
Linguistic Property |_
Morphosyntactic Property |_
Gender Property
|_ Masculine Gender
Definition:
A gender property established on the basis of agreement, to which nouns may be assigned based on semantic or formal criteria. In semantic gender systems, nouns belonging to the masculine gender typically denote male humans as well as nouns meeting certain physical criteria. Some gender systems differentiate masculine nouns from all other nouns (e.g. masculine/other or male human/other), while others differentiate masculine, feminine and neuter nouns or several different gender classes. [Corbett 1991: 30]
| Properties | Values | Definition |
Languages may differ with regard to the point in the animacy hierarchy where sex-based gender assignment occurs (e.g., whether masculine or feminine is restricted to humans only, or includes domestic animals etc.). Typically, with lower-order animates, sex-based assignment will not play a role. As well as the label 'masculine', it is also possible to use an arbitrary label, such as an ArabicNumeralGender or romanNumeralGender for this value. This may be the case in certain traditions (e.g., descriptions of Bantu and Daghestanian languages) where there is a larger number of gender values, or where the sex-based assignment system is limited to a particular portion of the animates.