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

9 Letizia Vezzosi
form to agree with the singular number, the nominative case and the feminine
gender of the noun lind, although the referent of lind is inanimate; for similar
reasons, wimman (m.) selects the masculine form of the determiner se.
(1) a. Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufode.
“That broad shield was good and I loved it.”
b. [Ch 1 7] Þurwif hatte se wimman… . Þa tymde Wulfstan hine to
Æþelstane æt Sunnanbyrig.
“The woman’s name was Th… . Then W. called her [as witness]
for Æthelstan at S.”
c. [ÆCHom ii.66.22] Babilonia … is gereht ‘gescyndnys’. Seo getacnað helle.
“Babilonia is described as ‘shame’. It denotes hell.”
As is clear in (1a–c), gender is also made explicit in terms of gender-specific pronominal
reference by personal pronouns: hire is feminine because it refers to lind
which is feminine, hine is masculine because wimman is grammatically masculine,
although semantically referring to a female being, and the demonstrative seo is
feminine because Babilonia is a burg ‘town’ which is feminine.
As undeniable as the grammatical nature of the gender system in Old English
might be, there are more than random instances of ‘unexpected’, ‘ungrammatical’
gender assignment as well as nouns of unstable gender (Matasović 200 ). This
phenomenon was noticed a long time ago, but for Old English it has so far been
analysed mainly in relation to borrowings (Wełna 1978) and Latin calques, 9 where
one can claim that the uncertainty in gender assignment can be ascribed either to
clashes between the source language and the target language or to such processes
as semantic analogy 10 and concept associations (Fleishhacker 1889).
Gender fluctuation is not limited to these cases, but also concerns words of
Germanic origin, completely unrelated to any foreign language influence. There
are three types of gender deviance from the norm: (a) some words show gender
variability outside and inside the NP (i.e., determiner, adjective, participles,
relative and personal pronouns) inasmuch as they may agree with the natural
gender of the referent, in contrast with their grammatical gender; (b) related
words with morphological differentiation and accordingly different gender may
express difference in perspective of their semantic content; and (c) more than
one gender is assigned to the same word, apparently without any motivation or
consequence.
9. In the present paper borrowings and Latin-based calques are objects of analysis. See also
Wełna (1978) who considers the conflicting factors involved in the assignment of some fifty
loanwords from Latin and Old Icelandic into Old English, or Fisiak (1975).
10. Semantic analogy concerns the loanword taking the gender of a noun of similar meaning
already in the language.