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

Gender assignment in Old English 91
languages of the world 3 ; less certain is how to define what it is. Since Hockett proposed
to define genders as “classes of nouns reflected in the behaviour of associated
words” (Hockett 1958: 231), gender has been associated with noun classification and
with agreement in view of the fact that gender only exists if grammatical forms with
variable gender (e.g., adjectives, pronouns, numerals and so on) regularly adopt
forms to agree with grammatical forms of invariable gender, usually nouns (Fodor
1959: 2). If the determining criterion of linguistic gender is agreement, then saying
that a language has three genders implies that there are three classes of nouns which
are syntactically distinguished by the agreements they take.
The way in which nouns are allotted to different genders is an intriguing question.
If agreement can be used as a test to establish the gender of a given noun,
native speakers must know the gender of nouns to produce correct sentences.
According to Corbett (1991: 7), gender assignment depends on two basic types
of information about the noun: its form and its meaning and accordingly formal
and semantic gender assignment systems can be distinguished.
Semantic systems are those systems where semantic factors 5 are sufficient on
their own to account for the assignment. In semantic terms, nouns can be divided
into those denoting animates and those denoting inanimates; the animates can
be subdivided into those which are sex-differentiable and those which are not,
the former in turn being subdivided into male and female. A case in point is the
Present Day English gender system, where words like woman or girl or cow are
feminine only for the reason that they refer to biologically female entities, man
or boy or bull are masculine since their referents are male, and book, table, kitten
and so on are neuter, because either they name inanimate entities, and therefore
biologically neither female nor male, or their sexuality is irrelevant.
. In some languages gender markers are also present in verbal forms, e.g., the Bantu form
a-likuja ‘came’ has the marker a- which marks gender 1/2 singular, in Arabic there are feminine vs.
masculine agreement forms in the verb, in a way similar to Italian: è andato/a ‘he/she has gone’.
. Corbett (1991: 33) claims that “there are no syntactic systems”. By ‘syntactic systems’ he
means types of gender assignment rules which determine the gender of a noun on exclusively
syntactic criteria, such as “nouns which take prepositional complements are neuter” (Corbett
1991: 33), according to which a noun is neuter only if it governs prepositions, but it is not neuter
in all the other syntactic environments. But we will show later that syntax can play a role in
gender assignment, at least in the old stages of Indo-European languages.
. In non-strict semantic systems, besides the core semantic distinctions [± human] and
[± animate], other concept associations may be responsible for noun classification (see also
Lakoff 1987): [± harmful], [± power] [± concrete] etc. (Corbett 1991: 16–32). Given that similar
distinctions are found in languages of totally unrelated families, classifications of gender semantic
systems since the 19th century have been proposed according to the patterns of distinctions
involved (see de la Grasserie 1989: 61 –15).