Gender in language is a morphosyntactic feature that classifies nouns into categories based on semantic and formal criteria and triggers the agreement of these nouns with other elements of language through formal means. In this paper, I review theories of gender assignement, from traditional typological to structural theories that place gender within the morphosyntactic apparatus. I describe in detail how gender agreement works and how semantic (meaning-based) and formal agreement (form-based) occur in languages, using the example of hybrid nouns and coordinated conjuncts. For both aspects of gender in language (gender assignement and gender agreement), I review the diachronic Indo-European linguistics. For Slovenian, I describe in more detail how nouns are assigned gender and describe subgenders for animacy and humanity, a particular aspect of Slavic languages. The purpose of the paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of how gender is expressed in language and what the role of gender in syntactic theory could be. I also draw attention to the entanglement of intralinguistic and social factors in the functioning of gender as a grammatical category.
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