Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Gender assignment in Old English
Letizia Vezzosi
University of Perugia
Old English has a three-gender formal assignment system, there are more
than scanty instances where the same noun shows more than one gender.
The phenomenon has been so far generally neglected both in textbooks and
linguistic literature. In the present paper, the author classifies the Old English
data, selected through a corpus analysis of electronic corpora and complete
literary works on the base of a comparison with relevant data from typological
investigations and historical linguistic studies, and shows that Old English
gender variance depends on semantic and pragmatic factors that interfere with
grammatical gender assignment, a linguistic fact that is cross-linguistically
common. More precisely, besides the cross-linguistically frequent semantic traits
such as [± animate] [± human], gender assignment in Old English seems to be
sensitive to semantic roles. This parameter does not conflict with the previous
semantic ones, since all of them can be derived from the more general feature
[± individuated].
1. Introduction
Old English is undisputedly said to have a grammatical gender, i.e., it resorts to
a formal gender assignment system according to Corbett’s (1991) definition of
linguistic gender: formal – namely morphological – rules determine whether a
noun is feminine, masculine or neuter regardless of its meaning.
This system is not fully consistent, and shows a significant number of exceptions,
where nouns appear to have more than one gender or a different gender from
their grammatical one. At the letter A in Clark’s Old English Dictionary 29 out of 72
nouns have more than one gender. This phenomenon was noticed at the end of the
19th century (cf. Fleischhacker 1889), although neither of the standard grammars
1. I would like to thank Prof. Koenig, Prof. Rosenbach and two anonimous reviewers for their
helpful comments. Any remaining inadequacies or mistakes are of course my own.