Gender in English
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Gender in the English language has been the focus of two distinct contemporary debates. Mid-20th century academics raised questions about whether English rightly may be said to possess grammatical gender. Second wave feminism promoted general minimization of gender reference in language. In some contexts, the two debates interacted in various ways.
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[edit] History
[edit] Old English
Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of Modern German and French (although French lacks the neuter):
- Every noun belonged to one of three grammatical gender classes (masculine, feminine, or neuter).
- Within the noun phrase, determiners and adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun.
- The third person personal pronouns and Interrogative/relative pronouns were chosen according to grammatical gender.
[edit] Development of natural gender
Old English by the 11th century was beginning to replace grammatical gender with natural gender. Thirteenth-century Middle English retained grammatical gender, but was in transition to the loss of a gender system as indicated by the increasing use of the gender-neutral identifier þe (the or thee).[1] English lost gender classes because of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century.[2] Gender loss began in the north of England; the south-east and the south-west Midlands were the most linguistically conservative regions, and Kent retained traces of gender in the 1340s.[1] Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender,[1] and Modern English has no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender.[2]
[edit] Modern English
Gender is no longer an inflectional category in Modern English.[3] A notable exception is that continents, nations, many cities, ships, airplanes, cars, and some organizations are sometimes referred to as she and are associated with her in the possessive. Old English followed the gender assignments of German for words derived from it.
The only traces of the Old English gender system are found in the pronominal system and pronoun-antecedent agreement in English that now is based generally on natural gender, with the notable exceptions.[4]
Benjamin Whorf considered grammatical gender to be a covert category in English.[5][6]
There are two manifestations of gender-based pronoun selection in English:
- The third person singular personal pronouns he/him, she/her, and it (as well as their possessive forms his, her(s), and its, and their reflexive and intensive forms himself, herself, and itself) are chosen according to the natural gender of the antecedent with some notable exceptions.
- The relative pronouns who and which are chosen according to the personal or animate (vs. impersonal or inanimate) status of the antecedent.
The resulting system can be summarized as follows:[7]
| Gender Class | Example | RP | PP | ||
| animate | personal | 1. male | brother | who | he |
| 2. female | sister | who | she | ||
| 3. dual | doctor | who | he/she, he, they | ||
| generic | 4. common | baby | who which |
he/she/it it |
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| 5. collective | family | which who |
it they |
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| impersonal | 6. higher male animal | bull | which (who) |
he/it he |
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| 7. higher female animal | cow | which (who) |
she/it she |
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| 8. lower animal | ant | which | it (he/she) | ||
| inanimate | 9. inanimate | carbon rod | which | it | |
Notes: RP is relative pronoun and PP personal pronoun. Alternatives are presented in three ways:
slash (/) — used equally; above & below — first preferred; parentheses "()" — disputed or unusual usage.
[edit] References
- ^ a b c Lass, Roger (2006). "Phonology and morphology". In Richard M. Hogg, David Denison. A history of the English language. Cambridge University Press. p. 70. ISBN 0521662273. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=U5FDi8WksqYC&pg=PA70.
- ^ a b Hellinger, Marlis; Bussmann, Hadumod (2001). "English — Gender in a global language". Gender across languages: the linguistic representation of women and men. 1. John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 107. ISBN 9027218412. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aBMX57viyRwC&pg=PA107.
- ^ Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002).
- ^ 'English Language', Encarta, (Microsoft Corporation, 2007). "The distinctions of grammatical gender in English were replaced by those of natural gender.". Archived 2009-10-31.
- ^ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 'Grammatical Categories', Language 21 (1945):1-11.
- ^ Robert A Hall Jr, 'Sex Reference and Grammatical Gender in English', American Speech 26 (1951): 170-172.
- ^ Table adapted from Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman, 1985. (p. 314)
