Gender, at least in romance languages (but generally in many SAE languages), can be described briefly as an intrinsic lexical property of nouns that trigger an agreement in its dependents : a noun belongs to one class, and its dependents (typically determiners and adjectives) must agree in gender with it.

For example in Spanish :

la hija buena

can be glossed as

'the.FEM daughter good.FEM'

"the good daughter"

Where "la" and "good" are in the feminine because they're dependencies of a feminine noun.

Are there any languages where such a system exists for other parts of speech ?

For example a language where adjectives would belong to one of two or more classes and trigger an agreement among their dependent adverbs ?

Such that a gloss could look like this, assuming that the adjective for "young" belong in class number II :

'very.II young'

  • In Slavic languages, verbs also agree by grammatical gender with nouns (main actor). E.g. in Ukrainian "I went", the verb has one of two different forms depending on whether "I" am Masculine or Feminine. Is this what you're asking about? (it is not very clear from the question's title and body) – bytebuster Jun 14 '18 at 17:29
  • No, I'm talking about a distinct system of agreement from gender. Gender is a system of noun classes, and thoses classes trigger agreement in other parts of speech (verbs, adjectives, etc). I'm looking for a comparable system but with classes of adjectives for example. – Typhon Jun 14 '18 at 18:16
  • Related: Why in most (all?) languages don't adjectives have gender independently of the nouns they modify? (see in particular user6726's answer) – brass tacks Jun 14 '18 at 21:40
  • 2
    Also related: linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/26800/… (as my answer there says, there do seem to be languages where adverbs agree with their head verb, but the examples I know of have to do with agreement in inflectional categories like voice rather than agreement with some kind of "verb class" analogous to noun gender) – brass tacks Jun 14 '18 at 21:43
  • Yes, that's close to what I had in mind, thanks ! – Typhon Jun 14 '18 at 22:47

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