Ricerc@Sapienza

Several semantic factors determine the grammatical gender of German nouns, mainly the natural gender and the association to semantic fields such as for example flowers (feminine), alcoholic beverages (masculine) or metals (neuter). Morphological factors such as derivative suffixes (-heit feminine, er masculin, -chen neutre) and phonological factors such as word endings (-e feminine, -en masculin) bear also relevance and can variously interact with semantic factors in determinating the gender of a specific noun.