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

9 Letizia Vezzosi
In a sense, all gender systems are semantic in that there is a semantic core even
in formal gender assignment systems 6 (Aksenov 198 : 17–18); for example, in Old
Germanic languages, nouns with animate and more constantly human referents
very rarely conflict with their formal gender. Nevertheless, in formal systems,
irrespective of any semantic-biased considerations, the rules for gender assignment
primarily depend on the form of nouns rather than their meaning. In those
systems, information for gender assignment may in turn be word-structure, comprising
derivation and inflection (morphology) and sound-structure (phonology).
Qatar (i.e., an East Cushitic language) is a language where gender assignment
depends on phonological criteria, since nouns that end in an accented vowel are
feminine (e.g., baxà ‘daughter’, catò ‘help’) whereas all the others are masculine
(e.g., bàxa ‘son’, baànta ‘trumpet’); Russian can be an example of morphological
gender systems, since the gender of a noun can be predicted on the basis of
its declensional type: e.g., nouns of declensional type I are masculine, nouns of
declensional types II and III are feminine and all the others are neuter (Corbett
1991: 36). In German derivation suffixes determine the gender of a noun: e.g.,
nouns ending with -heit, -keit, -ung, -schaft, -erei, are feminine, diminutives in
-lein, -chen are neuter as well as collectives with ge-prefix and -e suffix, and derivatives
with -ismus are masculine. Here the gender is clear from the noun itself and
not only from the agreeing forms: this phenomenon is known as overt gender.
Since the relationship with the meaning of the word is accessory, in such systems
there is a sort of arbitrariness in gender assignment and possible incompatibility
between sex and gender: noun x is feminine because it takes agreement y; in order
to produce agreement y correctly the native speaker must simply know that noun
x is feminine.
Gender is defined as a grammatical category proper to nominal systems. 7
However, as a grammatical category it has a special status. With regard to other
grammatical categories, such as tense and mood in verbal systems or number and
case in nominal systems, there is always an alternative choice inasmuch as a verb
can be either present or past, either indicative or subjunctive, and a noun can be
either singular or plural in the nominative rather than genitive case, and so on.
. For a system to be exclusively formal, there would also be no correlation between semantics
and the genders established in this way: “the distribution of the nouns across the genders would
be completely random as far as their meaning was concerned. Such a system is not found in any
natural language” (Corbett 1991: 63).
. Starting from the assumption that the agreement evidence is what counts as far as gender
is concerned, there is the need to distinguish the sets in which nouns are divided (controller
genders) from the agreement forms found (target genders).