Grammatical Gender - Gender Agreement

Gender Agreement

In the Spanish sentences Él es un buen actor "He is a good actor" and Ella es una buena actriz "She is a good actress", almost every word changes to match the gender of the subject. The noun actor inflects by replacing the masculine suffix -or with the feminine suffix -riz, the personal pronoun él "he" changes to ella "she", and the feminine suffix -a is added to the article (un → una) and to the adjective (buen → buena). Only the verb remains unchanged.

The following "highly contrived" Old English sentence serves as an example of gender agreement.

The word hire "her" refers to lind "shield". Since this noun was grammatically feminine, the adjectives brade "broad" and tilu "good", as well as the pronouns seo "the/that" and hire "her", which referred to lind, must also appear in their feminine forms. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections were greatly simplified by sound changes, and then completely lost (as well as number inflections, to a lesser extent).

In modern English, by contrast, the noun "shield" takes the neuter pronoun "it", since it designates a genderless object. In a sense, the neuter gender has grown to encompass most nouns, including many that were masculine or feminine in Old English. If one were to replace the phrase "broad shield" with "brave man" or "brave woman", the only change to the rest of the sentence would be in the pronoun at the end, which would become "him" or "her", respectively.