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

Gender assignment in Old English 99
establish a person’s sex, can be extended beyond their obvious domain and be
applied to nouns which would normally belong to what Corbett calls ‘semantic
residue’, i.e., biologically undistinguished. This could be the underlying mechanism
on the basis of which the Latin word vinea ‘vineyard-vine’ is glossed in the
Lindisfarne Gospel (see ex. 7) consistently with wingeard (f.) to express the idea of
vineyard and with wingeard (m.) to indicate vine. Here the feminine gender is a
meaning feature that denotes ‘X bearing Y’. 1
(7) [Lxxi/13,15]
and ongann ðæm³ him on bispellum sprecca wingeard gesette mon
et coepit illis in parabolis loqui vineam pastinauit homo
and sende to lond-buendum on tid esne þte from þæm lond-buendum
et misit ad agricolas in tempore serrum ut from agricolis
onfenge of wæstm þære wingearde and gelahton hine ofslogon and
acciperit de fructu vineae et apprehendes eum occiderunt et
gewurpon buta ðæm wingeard hwæt ofðon doeð hlaferd ðære
eiecerunt extra uineam quid ergo faciet dominus
wingearde cymeð and fordoeð ða lond-buendo and dabit þ
uineae uenit et perdet colonos et dabit
winegeard oðrum
uineam aliis
In a few cases, concept associations cause the assignment of different genders to
the same noun: hæð occurs as feminine, masculine and neuter, probably in analogy
to feld (m.) and gærs (n.) (see Fleischhacker 1889).
But cases such as wingeard and hæð are not the norm in this subset. With most
of those more-than-one-gender nouns, there is an alternation between neuter
and non-neuter gender, and if gender fluctuation has a meaning, it is not always
easily explicable in terms of extension of the semantic features prototypically
associated with feminine and masculine gender, nor with concept associations.
Nevertheless, there are behavioural consistencies: non-neuter gender is often
associated with (a) plurality, (b) specific interpretation, (c) individuatedness, and
(d) semantic roles.
in the residue gender. More specifically he accounts for the gender of Russian words for ‘fork’
and ‘knife’ to a Russian popular superstition according to which if a knife is dropped a male
guest will come, while if a fork is dropped a female guest can be expected. That’s why ‘knife’
in Russian is masculine and ‘fork’ is feminine. Of course these are post hoc explanations of an
apparently arbitrary phenomenon.
1 . Slightly different, but connected, meaning is embodied by feminine gender in Italian word
pairs, such as cassetto (m.) ‘drawer’ – cassetta (f.) ‘box’, cesto (m.) – cesta (f.) ‘corb’, where the feminine
gender denotes a bigger size of an object (e.g., [+ big]), often more suitable as a container.