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Gender

MORPHOLOGY: a term used to express to fact that nouns and determiners can belong to different morphological classes (Phi-features). In many languages nouns fall into three groups: masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns, each group being inflected differently. EXAMPLE: in Russian all nouns belong to one of three groups. If a noun ends in a non-palatalized consonant in its basic form it is masculine (e.g. stol 'table'), if it ends in -a it is feminine (e.g. lampa 'lamp'), and if it ends in -o it is neuter (e.g. okno 'window'). Some languages only distinguish two genders: EXAMPLE: Dutch only differentiates between neuters and non-neuters; non-neuters take the definite article de (de man 'the man'), while neuters take the definite article het (het kind 'the child').