Gender

Gender can be either a grammatical or a natural category. As a natural category, gender is the wide set of characteristics that are seen to distinguish between male and female entities; as a grammatical category, gender is used for the analysis of word-classes displaying such contrasts as masculine, feminine and neuter.

The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender, although they interact closely in many languages. The grammatical (masculine) gender of the French word "danseur", for instance, seems to be motivated by the fact that it refers to a male dancer, in opposition to "danseuse" (feminine), which refers to a female dancer; on the other hand, the grammatical gender of the French word "sang" (=blood) is rather arbitrary, provided that blood is neither a male or a female entity (indeed, "sangre", which is the Spanish equivalent to "sang", is feminine).

In the UNL approach, grammatical gender, as a language-dependent feature, should be informed only in the UNL-NL dictionary; natural gender, on the other hand, should be represented through specific attributes in the UNL-ization process.

Grammatical Gender

In the UNLarium framework, grammatical gender should be informed only for gender-inflective languages (such as French, Russian, Spanish, but not English), according to five different values:

• MCL = Masculine (“sang” (fr), “couleur” (fr), "message" (fr), etc.)
• FEM = Feminine (“sangre” (es), “color” (es), "mensagem" (pt), etc.)
• NEU = Neuter ("das Pfund" (de), "krzesło" (pl), etc.)
• MOF = Masculine or Feminine, i.e., common (motivated) gender (the lexical item has a single form, and the gender is actually assigned by the determiner, according to the sex of the referent (fr: “le pianiste” (man) or “la pianiste” (woman))
• MAF = Masculine and Feminine, i.e., unstable (arbitrary) gender (the gender is not clearly fixed by the language, such as in French “après-midi” (=afternoon), which may be used both in the masculine and in the feminine form, without any distinction: “un après-midi” or “une après-midi”)

Natural Gender

In UNL, grammatical gender is not represented, but natural gender is represented by attributes in case of animate referents whose gender is marked. The gender attributes are the following:

@male

male teacher = teacher.@male

@female

female teacher = teacher.@female

@neutral

Examples

English

teacher = teacher (no natural gender information)

female teacher = teacher.@female

French

un professeur = professeur (no natural gender information)

une enseignante = enseignant.@female

la femme = femme (gender lexicalized) or être humain.@female

la lune = lune (no natural gender, only grammatical gender)