Grammatical gender systems: A linguist's assessment

The notion of grammatical gender is defined and criteria for assigning noun s to genders are discussed, in particular semantic and formal criteria. Dat a from child language acquisition show that both semantic and formal criter ia can be the basis of children's overgeneralizations, although the questio n of to what extent more opaque semantic or formal gender assignment criter ia are available to children remains to be ascertained.