Introduction: Gender and the Lexicon

system that links grammatical gender and a so-called "natural" gender.Yet there is reason to question the "[...] linguistic usefulness of the category of gender, [...] at first sight completely devoid of function and without logical motivation" (Violi [1987: 20]) 1 .Indeed, gender, as a grammatical category, is less prominent in some languages: French, German, Russian, Spanish or Hindi (languages with a grammatical gender) differ from English or Scandinavian languages, which have a natural gender that distinguishes between masculine, feminine and neuter.They also differ from languages with an unmarked gender such as Finnish, Turkish, Persian, Chinese or Bantu, in which nouns and pronouns have no grammatical gender (Stahlberg et al. [2007: 164-166]).Regarding the English language, Larreya & Rivire [2010: 153] explain: "Usually, in English -unlike in French -gender is natural, i.e. the grammatical alternation of gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) matches the physical distinction of sex (male, female) or absence of sex".These extralinguistic parameters are also described by Lapaire & Rotg [1991: 217] as having become fundamental, in contemporary English, for "assigning masculine, feminine and neuter labels [based on] the 'natural' opposition between animate and inanimate, and, within the animate category, on the distinction