GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY

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GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY. In LINGUISTICS, a class of units such as noun, verb, prepositional phrase, finite clause and features such as case, countability, gender, number. These may in turn be subcategorized into kinds of noun, case, etc. Since nouns may be subclassified in various ways that do not coincide, they are said to be cross-classified in such pairs as countable/uncountable, common/proper, animate/inanimate. Grammatical units such as subject and object, which refer to functional relationships between the parts of a sentence or clause, are often termed functional categories. See PART OF SPEECH.