Gender assignment and the structure of the lexicon

Abstract

This article provides a general survey of a number of (mostly Indo-European) gender systems. In recent years, regularities found in those systems have been accounted for by rule-based approaches where gender is assigned on-line by symbolic rules. A critical investigation of those accounts suggests that gender of existing nouns is stored individually, but that there must also be a mechanism that assigns gender to new nouns. It is argued that this behaviour is more adequately accounted for in a network model and it is shown how gender assignment can shed light on lexical structure at large.