Notion
In general, there are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes:
- according to similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion),
- by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or
- through an arbitrary convention.
Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. The fact that a noun belongs to a given class may imply the presence of:
- agreement affixes on adjectives, pronouns, numerals etc. which are noun phrase constituents,
- agreement affixes on the verb,
- a special form of a pronoun which replaces the noun,
- an affix on the noun,
- a class-specific word in the noun phrase (or in some types of noun phrases).
Modern English expresses noun classes through the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms. The choice between the relative pronoun who (persons) and which (non-persons) may also be considered a way of categorizing nouns into noun classes. A few nouns also exhibit vestigial noun classes, such as stewardess, where the suffix -ess added to steward denotes a female person. This type of noun affixation is not very frequent in English, but quite common in languages which have the true grammatical gender, including most of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs.
When noun class is expressed on other parts of speech, besides nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender.
In languages without inflectional noun classes, nouns may still be extensively categorized by independent particles called noun classifiers.
Read more about this topic: Noun Class
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