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

9 Letizia Vezzosi
b. [Genesis 2382–2383] þa þæt wif ahloh wereda drihtnes nalles glædlice,
ac heo gearum frod
“then the woman laughed at the lord of hosts, by no means kindly, for
she, [was] advanced in years”
In all those cases there is a conflict between ‘semantic’ agreement and ‘syntactic’
agreement: a linguistic fact cross-linguistically quite frequent in formal gender
assignment systems, when the grammatical gender and the meaning of the noun
clash. Especially in the case of pronominal gender, Moravcsik (1978) had already
noticed that in noun phrase external agreement (e.g., agreement between
nouns and verbs or anaphoric pronouns) grammatical gender agreement is often
optional. 11 In his typological studies, by handling many instances of gender
divergence and fluctuation between semantic and syntactic agreement, Corbett
individuates four types of agreement targets, arranges them into a hierarchy
of agreement (5), and formulates constraints about the possible agreement
patterns, as in (6a–c).
(5) Agreement hierarchy (Corbett 1991: 20 )
Attributive > Predicative > Relative Pronoun > Personal Pronoun
(6) a. As we move rightwards along the hierarchy, the likelihood of semantic
agreement will increase monotonically (that is with no intervening
decrease). (Corbett 1991: 20 )
b. If parallel targets show different agreement forms, then the further target
will show semantic agreement. (Corbett 1991: 235)
c. For any particular target type, the further it is removed from its controller,
the greater the likelihood of semantic agreement. (Corbett 1991: 235)
These are also the agreement targets present in Old English and the discrepancies
noted above are explicable in terms of Corbett’s maxims (6a–c). In a typological
perspective, then, Old English does not differ from many other languages
with formal gender systems, at least with regard to this kind of gender fluctuation.
When grammatical gender is not as expected, it is only because the referential
gender of the noun overrides the lexical gender (Dahl 2000: 105–106). Like other
languages in the world, this also happens in Old English when the morphology of
the noun does not match its semantic content, and accordingly the gender of the
variable gender words may be determined by the gender of the conceptualised
referent.
11. Moravcsik (1978) distinguishes noun-phrase external agreement from noun phrase internal
agreement (i.e., inflection of nouns, relative pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, possessives,
articles and numerals) where grammatical gender agreement is obligatory.