Grammatical gender in polish and east slavic languages remarks on the accusative case

Abstract

In contemporary Polish linguistics, several approaches to the category of grammatical gender coexist, both traditional, dating back to ancient times, and more recent solutions. Traditionally, grammatical gender is understood on the basis of a tripartite division – masculine, feminine, and neuter, based on the singular nominative. A similar perspective is adopted in all East Slavic languages. In more recent approaches, the division into grammatical gender is based on the accusative and gender forms. The accusative approach provides for five grammatical genders: masculine personal, masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine and neuter, while the genitive encompasses four generic classes in the singular and five in the plural. Such descriptive propositions are alien to other Slavic languages, although the latter do possess the category of animacy, one example of which is the accusative. In East Slavic languages, animate nouns of all grammatical gender are assigned syncretic endings with the genitive in the accusative plural. In contemporary Polish, on the other hand, distinguishing a class of plural animate nouns is irrelevant from an inflectional point of view. These differences are the reason for interferences and linguistic errors both when Poles endeavour to learn East Slavic languages and when Eastern Slavs acquire Polish.