Gender and number in the nominal domain: An introduction

In this introduction, we provide a general overview of the properties of gender and number, two nominal grammatical categories that this special issue is devoted to. Grammatical gender and number have been studied from a variety of theoretical viewpoints and still there is no commonly established and well-defined view on the nature of the two categories. The term ‘gender’ is used for a range of grammatical phenomena, including noun-classification into corresponding inflection classes and syntactically conditioned rules of agreement and concord. Like grammatical gender, grammatical number can be realized through inflection on the noun and/or through the agreement that it triggers on other items. However, unlike grammatical gender, grammatical number has stable, straightforward and systematic interpretive effects, related to the quantity of the predicate denoted by the noun, and hence also of the referent when the nominal expression is referential. Number and gender are core features of nouns and make up or participate in some of the hallmark properties of natural language.