This article presents recent scholarship about origin and function of grammatical gender. Gender is considered to be either opaque or to serve for reference tracking, in facilitating the access to the mental lexicon or in structuring it... more
This article presents recent scholarship about origin and function of grammatical gender. Gender is considered to be either opaque or to serve for reference tracking, in facilitating the access to the mental lexicon or in structuring it semantically with regard to nominal aspect. This latter proposition is here discussed taking into consideration hypotheses about the emergence and development of gender in PIE and the function of the suffix *-(a)h2. Evidence from the Germanic, Romance and Brittonic languages illustrates the long-term developments that occurred in connection with the restructuring of gender systems in which the continuation or the revival of gender semantics for parts
of the lexicon may be observed.
