Occurrence
Grammatical gender is quite common phenomenon in the world's languages. A typological survey of 174 languages revealed that over one fourth of them had grammatical gender. Gender systems rarely overlap with numerical classifier systems. Gender and noun class systems are usually found in fusional or agglutinating languages, while classfiers are more typical of isolating languages. Thus, the main characteristincs of gendered languages are:
- Location in an area with languages featuring noun classes.
- Preference for head-marking morphology.
- Moderate to high morphological complexity.
- Non-accusative alignment.
Read more about this topic: Grammatical Gender
Famous quotes containing the word occurrence:
“One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)