【正确答案】正确答案："Gender" displays such contrasts as "masculine", "feminine", "neuter", or "animate" and "inanimate", etc., for the analysis of word classes. When word items refer to the sex of the real-world entities, we are talking about natural gender. The opposite is grammatical gender. In English, the gender distinctions are on the whole natural, determined by the biological gender of the creature, e.g. actor, actress; hero, heroine; prince, princess; lion, lioness. In, contrast, the gender distinctions in languages like French are grammatical. They may have nothing to do with the sex of the real-world entities at all. And all nouns have gender distinctions whether they refer to animate entities or not.