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

Gender assignment in Old English 9
On the contrary, nominal gender allows no choice: as a rule, the gender of a noun
cannot possibly be equally masculine or feminine or neuter.
Moreover, not only is gender visible through agreement, but also the function
of gender itself seems to be reduced to agreement, unlike the other nominal
categories which, while showing agreement, are not reduced to it.
. Gender in Old English
In Old English grammars and textbooks it is commonly stated that Old English
has a formal system of gender assignment, like the other Old Germanic languages.
Specifically there are three grammatical genders, i.e., feminine, masculine and
neuter, whose assignment is claimed to be at most semantically unmotivated.
Thus, different words referring to the same object can have different genders, as
shown in the Old English pair ecg (f.) sweord (m.) for ‘sword’; the nouns wifman or
wif (both for ‘woman’) are masculine and neuter respectively.
As in Modern German, the Old English formal system is based not on the
sound-form of the noun, but on its morphological structure. In other words, the
gender of a noun is dependent on the presence of derivational suffixes or on the
declensional type. Thus, suffixes such as -lac or -et mark neuter gender (e.g., boclac
‘decree’, þeowet ‘slavery’), -ð/ðu(*-iþō), -ung, *-īn, * -jō, -nes, -estre and -wist
belong to the feminine gender (e.g., mægðmaiden’, hræglung ‘clothing’, strengu
‘strength’, þiefþu ‘theft’, clænes ‘purity’, lærestre ‘teacher’, huswist ‘household’), and
-aþ/-oð, -dom, -end, -els, -ere, -had, -scipe masculine (e.g., fiscoþ ‘fishing’, cynedom
‘reign’, hælend ‘Saviour’, cnyttels ‘sinew’, leornere ‘disciple’, cildhad ‘childhood’, burgscipe
‘township’). Analogously, some thematic classes determine the gender of the
nouns following their inflectional patterns: e.g., strong declension in -o- or in -a- 8
only comprise nouns of masculine/neuter and feminine nouns respectively (e.g.,
stan-stanes pl. stanas ‘stone’ or wif-wifes pl. wifu as an -a-stem noun vs. giefu-giefe pl.
giefa-e ‘gift’ an -o-stem noun).
In Old English, gender is a covert and selectional parameter, to use Whorf ’s
terminology (19 5: 3ff.), since it has no overt exponent, but becomes visible only
by selecting a specific exponent for case and number both inside and outside the
NP. In the following examples the predicative strongly inflected adjective tilu, the
attributive weakly inflected brade and the deteminer seo appear in their feminine
. It should be recalled that the gender of most Old English nouns is not predictable from
their morphology: e.g., a strong noun-ending with a consonant in the nominative singular could
belong to any of the three genders.