Grammatical category

In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive. Frequently encountered grammatical categories include:

• Case, varying according to function.
• Gender, with values like Male, Female, Animate, Inanimate, Neuter, and more general classes.
• Number, varying according to the number of things.
• Tense, varying according to when an action takes place, whether in the present, past or future.
• Aspect, varying according to how much time an action will take, whether finished, repeated or habitual.
• Mood, varying according to modality, or the speaker's attitude towards the action.

Although the use of terms varies from author to author, a distinction should be made between grammatical categories and lexical categories. Lexical categories (considered syntactic categories) largely correspond to the parts of speech of traditional grammar, and refer to nouns, adjectives, etc.

A phonological manifestation of a category value (for example, a word ending that marks "number" on a noun) is sometimes called an exponent.

Grammatical relations define relationships between words and phrases with certain parts of speech, depending on their position in the syntactic tree. Traditional relations include subject, object, and indirect object.