Grammatical gender in Romance
The most widespread type of gender system is exemplified with Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, and Sardinian data. These languages all have parallel binary systems, with the masculine selected by default (e.g. for gender resolution, non-agreement, or—in most cases—agreement with non-nominal controllers). While dialect variation is covered in the following chapters, here a flavour thereof is conveyed by introducing binary convergent systems, which represent a further development (due to sound change merging agreement targets in the plural) of the mainstream binary system. The chapter then reviews semantic and formal assignment rules. Romance gender systems are never entirely semantic, but they always have a semantic nucleus: names of male/female human beings and sex-differentiable animals are assigned masculine and feminine via semantic rule in all Romance languages. These differ widely in the extent to which formal (morphological and phonological) rules are at work, and in how these look.