A three-dimensional approach to the gender/sex of nouns in Biblical Hebrew

What it is about

Grammars usually split noun gender into two levels, grammatical gender and natural sex, assuming the ending and the agreement of a noun go together. Kroeze tests that assumption on the 328 most frequent nouns (from Claassen's list, genders checked in BDB). Form and agreement match in only 68.3% of them; in almost one noun in three they diverge somewhere (masculine form with feminine agreement 6.4%, feminine form with masculine agreement 3.0%, nouns with mixed singular/plural endings about 20%). He therefore proposes three separate levels: morphological gender (the ending), syntactic gender (agreement with adjectives, verbs, numerals) and semantic gender (sex of the referent), and lists 23 combinations found.

Ideas

• I1. Keep three gender fields per noun lemma in the Torah dictionary: form gender (from the ending, singular and plural separately), agreement gender (measured from the trees), referent sex (from the lexicon); a noun like אָב with plural אָבוֹת then shows its mismatch explicitly.
• I2. Measure agreement gender from the trees: for each noun lemma count the gender of verbs whose nsubj it is and of amod adjectives; compare with MACULA's Gender and report the mismatch rate, against Kroeze's 31.7%.
• I3. Use the mismatch list as a parser check: an agreement rule in tools/macula that links subject and verb by gender must consult agreement gender, not the ending, or it will misattach the 1 in 3 nouns.
• I4. Report "common" agreement (nouns taking both genders, e.g. דֶּרֶךְ, שֶׁמֶשׁ) as a category of its own rather than as noise.

For Mova

I1 and I4 belong in languages/hbo/04-noun.md (gender) and as columns in macula dict (the Torah dictionary). I2 is a measure on the Torah trees; I3 a guard for any agreement-based rule in tools/macula.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4102/lit.v15i3.682

@inproceedings{kroeze1994three,
  title = {{A three-dimensional approach to the gender/sex of nouns in Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Kroeze, Jan Hendrik},
  booktitle = {Literator},
  year = {1994},
  doi = {10.4102/lit.v15i3.682},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v15i3.682}
}

References

12 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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