Gender
Gender is a pure grammatical term that deals with the grammatical expression of grammatical gender, i.e. the expression of masculine, feminine and neuter genders [Iriskulov, 21].
Gender is often purely formal in nature and is only partially influenced by biological sex [Muller, 20].
Gender is a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms [3].
Grammatical gender is currently viewed as a complex feature that does not always rest on easily identifiable functional motivations beyond the semantic core that all gender systems with no exception have. Some authors have even claimed that gender either lacks linguistic function altogether or presents puzzlingly afunctional characteristics, and ascribe its steady disappearance referents in some languages to this property [Igartua, 1].
⠀ 1. Iriskulov A.I. (2006). Theoretical Grammar of English. Tashkent: Uzbek State World Languages University.
⠀ 2. Stefan Müller. (2016). Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. Berlin: Language Science Press.
⠀ 3. Retrieved from: Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender].
⠀ 4. Iván Igartua. (2019). Loss of grammatical gender and language contact. Diachronica. 36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.