German grammar with the natural gender of what is described. However, since the diminutive forms ending in "-chen" or "-lein" are grammatically neuter, there exist several notable counterexamples such as "das Mädchen" ("girl") and "das Fräulein" ("miss"). Thus these are not illogical, whereas "das Weib" (old, regional or anthropological: woman; a cognate of the English "wife") is really an exception. Furthermore, in German, the gender of nouns without natural gender is not predictable. For example, the three common pieces of cutlery all have different genders: "das Messer" ("knife") is neuter, "die Gabel" ("fork") is feminine, and "der Löffel" ("spoon") is masculine. Students
Polarity item Polarity item In linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that can appear only in environments associated with a particular grammatical polarity – affirmative or negative. A polarity item that appears in affirmative (positive) contexts is called a positive polarity item (PPI), and one that appears in negative contexts is a negative polarity item (NPI). The environment in which a polarity item is permitted to appear is called a "licensing context". In the simplest case, an affirmative statement provides a licensing context for a PPI, while negation provides a licensing context for an NPI. However, there are many complications,