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 The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral (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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