Grammar.
Agreement.
In addition to the terms used for the parts of
speech, traditional grammatical analysis
hasalsogivenusanumberofothercategories,in
cluding“number,”“person,”“tense,” “voice”
and “gender.” These categories can be
discussed in isolation, but their role in
describing language structure becomes
clearer when we consider them in terms of
agreement. For example, we say that the
verb loves “agrees with” the noun Cathy in
the sentence Cathy loves her dog.
Grammatical gender.
The type of biological distinction used in
English is quite different from the more
common distinction found in languages
that use grammatical gender. Whereas
natural gender is based on sex (male and
female), grammatical gender is based on
the type of noun (masculine and feminine)
and is not tied to sex. In this latter sense,
nouns are classified according to their
gender class and, typically, articles and
adjectives have different forms to “agree
with” the gender of the noun.