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

90 Letizia Vezzosi
(Campbell 1959; & Brunner 1962) hints to it, 2 but has so far received little if any
attention. At most it has been considered as either the outcome of language contact
interference (Latin influence) or scribal error (Fisiak 1975; Mitchell 1985 & Wełna
1978; etc.).
The topic of the present chapter is exactly those gender assignment deviations
from the formal system, with the exception of borrowings, loanwords and words
formed on a Latin pattern. We intend to investigate whether it is a random phenomenon,
due to scribal misunderstanding or error, or whether it shows some
kind of consistency on the basis of which one can figure out rules that can account
for gender assignment aberrations.
To do so, Old English textual data, gathered from the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by
Bosworth and Toller (1898), the Toronto on-line Old English Dictionary and the Helsinki
Corpus, will be compared with relevant data from typological investigations
and historical linguistic or Indo-European studies, and consequently classified according
to the type of gender assignment they take. This approach will prove to be
a valuable tool for identifying coherence in gender inconsistency. Indeed, it clearly
reveals that gender variance is not arbitrary, but depends on various semantic and
pragmatic factors that may interfere with the Old English grammatical gender assignment
system, i.e., the Old English noun classification. More precisely, besides
semantic traits such as [± animate] [± human], further semantic differentiations,
significant from an anthropological or cultural point of view, such as [± containing]
[± power], are related to gender variability. Whereas semantic features such as
[± animate] or [± power] play roles in gender assignment systems in the languages
of the world, gender assignment in Old English seems to be sensitive to another
unexpected feature, namely semantic roles: more precisely, masculine and feminine
genders are preferred when the noun plays the role of an agent, whereas neuter
gender is selected for the patient. This parameter like the other semantic features
interfering with the Old English grammatical gender assignment will be shown to
derive from the same and more general principle [± individuated]. Interestingly
enough, this is the same macro-factor which is nowadays responsible for gender
variation in spoken English varieties and dialects.
1.1 Gender definition
Before starting the core discussion, it may be worth recalling what we mean by
the term ‘gender’. It is certain that gender is a category of any nominal system in the
. Campbell (1959 § 569 and refs) and Brunner (1962 § 236Anm) do not ignore the
phenomenon, but mention it only in relation to late confusion in inflections which in turn
contributed to it.