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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Up to this point we have assumed that nouns can be divided into genders and we have analysed the composition of these genders, considering whether they are based solely on semantic criteria, or whether formal factors also have a role. We now turn to gender agreement. This is important for two reasons: first, it is the way in which gender is realized in language use; and second, as a consequence, gender agreement provides the basis for defining gender and for establishing the number of genders in a given language. In this chapter we concentrate on the variety of ways in which gender is exemplified in the languages of the world, leaving to chapter 6 the procedures for determining the number of genders in a given language. While there is a broad consensus on the core cases of agreement, there is no generally accepted definition; there is a problem as to the outer limit of phenomena properly described as agreement, as we shall see when the personal pronoun is discussed in section 5.1. A working definition is provided by Steele (1978: 610):
The term agreement commonly refers to some systematic covariance between a semantic or formal property of one element and a formal property of another. For example, adjectives may take some formal indication of the number and gender of the noun they modify.
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