Category of grammatical gender in the Polish language system, discourse and glottodidactics

Abstract

The aim of the article is to describe the category of gender in Polish from three perspectives: the perspective of the grammatical system, of discourse and of glottodidactics. In the grammatical description, the author emphasizes the syntactic function and the rules for dividing Polish nouns into genders. She draws attention to different ways of linguistic symbolization of gender in a discourse, which may be divergent from the grammatical gender. She notices differences between the acquisition of the category in question by native and non-native users. From the perspective of pedagogical grammar, she analyzes the mistakes of foreigners in terms of gender and proposes general principles of teaching this category.