The difference in meaning and its effect on the difference in gender of nouns masculine and feminine

Abstract

      This research addresses a number of words whose meanings have varied and diversified, leading to differences in their grammatical gender — masculine or feminine. Thus, depending on certain meanings, a word may be masculine, while in others, it may be feminine.

This study establishes a link between semantics and morphology, showing that the variation in the grammatical gender of these words results from the differences in their meanings. The aim is to highlight how gender distinction serves to differentiate between the various semantic uses of these words.

The research relies mainly on linguistic dictionaries to determine the meanings of these words, as well as on specialized works that classify nouns according to their grammatical gender — identifying which are masculine, which are feminine, and which allow both usages — and clarifying cases where a word is masculine in one sense and feminine in another.