- Grammatical category
A grammatical category or functional category is a linguistic term encompassing, among other things:
*Grammatical aspect
*Grammatical case
*Grammatical mood
*Definiteness
*Specificity
*Animacy
*Evidentiality
*Noun class
*Grammatical gender
*Grammatical number
*Grammatical polarity
*Grammatical tense
*Transitivity
*Grammatical voice
*Grammatical person
* Countability (count noun vs.mass noun )A grammatical category is a set of features which express related conceptual distinctions of
grammatical function . The features in the same category are mutually exclusive, often expressed in a formally similar way, and may be subject to agreement constraints.For example, in English, the
grammatical number of anoun such as "bird" in:* The bird sing-s.
* The bird-s sing.is either singular or plural, which is expressed overtly by the absence or presence of the suffix "-s", and is constrained by the grammatical number in "sing-s" singular and "sing" plural.
The list of all overtly expressed categories in a language constitute the functional items of that language, as opposed to its
lexical items .References
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsAGrammaticalCategory.htm What is a grammatical category?] - SIL.org
See also
*
Grammatical function
* Agreement
*Inflection
*Syntax
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