Gender agreement in German, French and Italian.

The following study deals with gender agreement in two Romance languages and in German. A contrastive analysis, focussing on some grammatical categories (noun, possessives, demonstratives) illustrates the main properties of these languages with respect to gender. Then, on the syntactic and textinternal level, Corbett's theory of the agreement hierarchy will be discussed and extended by other syntactic and textlinguistic categories such as proximity or distance and the communicative necessity for gender agreement. Finally, the principle of the so-called servitude grammaticale will be exemplified and discussed, especially with respect to French and Italian.