The gender of the French noun and the means of its grammatical expression in a comparative historical aspect

this article examines the means of grammatical expressions of the gender category in modern French, examines the history of the formation of the modern binary French grammatical gender category from the perspective of diachrony, and examines the ways in which the neuter forms of Latin are lost. In the course of the study, it was possible to establish that the gender category belongs to the so-called iterative categories, which extend to several parts of speech: gender is inherent in a noun with which an adjective, an ordinal number, as well as a pronoun, partly a verb. In classical and early vernacular Latin, the gender category was three-component, but over time it was transformed into a binary category in the vernacular, which became possible due to the gradual loss of neuter forms. This process took place after the emergence of doublet forms of endings of different genders, as well as through the reinterpretation of some grammatically homonymous forms in favor of masculine and feminine genders. It can be assumed that the category of the neuter gender, as well as many other grammatical phenomena, was gradually abolished in the Romance languages in the general trend of the desire for analyticism of this language group and, in general, is one of the signs of increased analyticism in any language. If some Romance languages have rudimentary and preserved separate forms of the neuter gender or traces of them, they usually go back to the forms of classical or folk Latin. As a result of the development of analytical trends in the structure of the French language, the article and its functional analogues, determinants, have become the main indicator of the grammatical category of gender. Along with the main analytical means, there are morphological means: suffixes, as well as alternating designations of male/female faunonyms and anthroponyms. The suffix designation of the noun genus reflects a historical tradition dating back to the Latin language. The modern system of suffix formations is characterized by a large number and variety of forms with the main criterion of their division by gender into two subgroups. The definition of the genus of nouns is complicated by its conditional nature – the gender meaning of the genus is confirmed by biological sex only in the names of creatures (animate objects), for names of inanimate objects it has no gender motivation. In modern formation of feminine forms, the tendency of folk word-making has manifested itself by analogy with vernacular forms.

grammatical category of gender, French in synchrony and diachrony, folk Latin