Referent gender

The gender a word restricts its referents to, which a language's semantic rules of gender assignment read: for people the gender they are taken to have, for the animals a language differentiates their sex. A noun or name restricts it where the language has a form for each, as mother and father or lioness and lion. The two values are the restrictions words impose, not a classification of referents: teacher imposes none, and a pronoun's presupposition lets a referent be neither masculine nor feminine. A word token realizes a referent gender as a Universal Dependencies gender tag (ReferentGender.toUD).

References

• Corbett 1991, Gender formalized
• Konnelly & Cowper 2020, Gender diversity and morphosyntax: An account of singular they formalized
• Corbett & Fedden 2016, Canonical gender