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

9 Letizia Vezzosi
of gender assignment was traditionally considered to reflect an intermediate stage
between the Proto-Indo-European system which opposes common gender to neuter
gender (Brugmann 1897; Schwink 200 & Sieburg 1997) and a subsequent
stage with three gender oppositions. Initially every noun could be inflected with
three different nominal endings, i.e., assigned to three genders, which modify the
meaning of the noun in a specific way (Lehmann 1958): masculine had ‘singulative’
quality, neuter was a nominal resultative and feminine a collective.
What has been observed in Old English examples, as well as in the other Old
Germanic languages, could be a reflex of the original Indo-European categorical
meanings of the three gender opposition, before the gender oppositions formally
dissolved and the corresponding semantic oppositions consequently broke down,
giving rise to grammatical gender.
. Third type: more than one gender related to [± individuated]
The most immediate case of multiple gender pertains to those nouns like baby,
doctor and so on, otherwise called ‘nouns of common gender’ (Corbett 1991: 181).
In Old English, such nouns have different derivative suffixes that express gender
difference: thus the word ‘wolf ’ appears as wulf following the a-stem declension
when referring to both to wolves and to he-wolf, but is wylf, i.e., jo-stem noun
derived from wulf if feminine; similarly henn is the feminine derivative from the
masculine hann ‘cock’; otherwise, different suffixes were used, as in the case of
hunta (m) ‘hunter’ and hunticge/huntigestre (f.). Therefore, they do not represent
any ambiguous instance of gender encoding in Old English.
Much more interesting is another subset of Old English nouns that appears with
inflectional morphology associated with two or three gender classes and includes
inanimates: for example, sæ ‘sea’ can be either feminine or masculine; sæl ‘time’, usually
masculine, also occurs as feminine; hearg ‘temple’ is masculine as often as it is
feminine, and so on. In fact, such a fluctuation in gender assignment cannot possibly
be explained in terms of Corbett’s hierarchy or maxims and is not easily inserted
in Lehmann’s (1958) frame. Apparently no such pragmatic or semantic reasons as
those in § 2.1 can be called for, nor do their meanings differ in terms of the singulative
– collective – resultative perspective, although they mean differently.
In a very restricted group, the ‘connotations’ of gender appear to be brought to
the surface. Following Jakobson’s (1966) intuition, 13 in some circumstances, the
factors which help determine the semantic rule, that is, the things which help us
1 . Jakobson (1966: 236–7) is also more extreme, when he claims ‘everyday verbal mythology
and poetry’ can be ‘potential circumstances’ in which semantic gender may appear meaningful