Remarks on the complexity of gender

Resumen

This squib presents some aspects of the nature of gender complexity and how it can be conceived throughout the linguistic literature. Emphasis is placed on the empirical difficulties that need to be considered in assessing the nature of gender as a category in grammar. Our target is to discuss the morphosyntactic manifestation of gender as a (complex) feature, focusing on the difficulty of defining it as a traditional feature. As gender can be defined as a system of agreement classes (CORBETT, 1991), agreement is the criterion used to decide how many genders a language has and which nouns belong to which gender. We present current proposals about formal and functional gender manifestation throughout languages, aiming at describing their behaviour and possible consequences for the syntax of this category. According to Kramer (2015), natural/biological and arbitrary gender have the same pre-syntactic nature, with the derivation responsible for differentiating them post-syntactically. However, the classification of such category as biological and/or arbitrary brings along with it important discussions on how this process determines the distribution and the semantic-pragmatic interpretation of such structure, taking into account, for instance, the speaker’s world knowledge. This complexity, nonetheless, can be interpreted by means of the computation of gender.