Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
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Gender assignment in Old English 99<br />
establish a person’s sex, can be extended beyond <strong>the</strong>ir obvious domain and be<br />
applied to nouns which would normally belong to what Corbett calls ‘semantic<br />
residue’, i.e., biologically undistinguished. This could be <strong>the</strong> underlying mechanism<br />
on <strong>the</strong> basis of which <strong>the</strong> Latin word vinea ‘vineyard-vine’ is glossed in <strong>the</strong><br />
Lindisfarne Gospel (see ex. 7) consistently with wingeard (f.) to express <strong>the</strong> idea of<br />
vineyard and with wingeard (m.) to indicate vine. Here <strong>the</strong> feminine gender is a<br />
meaning feature that denotes ‘X bearing Y’. 1<br />
(7) [Lxxi/13,15]<br />
and ongann ðæm³ him on bispellum sprecca wingeard gesette mon<br />
et coepit illis in parabolis loqui vineam pastinauit homo<br />
and sende to lond-buendum on tid esne þte <strong>from</strong> þæm lond-buendum<br />
et misit ad agricolas in tempore serrum ut <strong>from</strong> agricolis<br />
onfenge of wæstm þære wingearde and gelahton hine ofslogon and<br />
acciperit de fructu vineae et apprehendes eum occiderunt et<br />
gewurpon buta ðæm wingeard hwæt ofðon doeð hlaferd ðære<br />
eiecerunt extra uineam quid ergo faciet dominus<br />
wingearde cymeð and fordoeð ða lond-buendo and dabit þ<br />
uineae uenit et perdet colonos et dabit<br />
winegeard oðrum<br />
uineam aliis<br />
In a few cases, concept associations cause <strong>the</strong> assignment of different genders to<br />
<strong>the</strong> same noun: hæð occurs as feminine, masculine and neuter, probably in analogy<br />
to feld (m.) and gærs (n.) (see Fleischhacker 1889).<br />
But cases such as wingeard and hæð are not <strong>the</strong> norm in this subset. With most<br />
of those more-than-one-gender nouns, <strong>the</strong>re is an alternation between neuter<br />
and non-neuter gender, and if gender fluctuation has a meaning, it is not always<br />
easily explicable in terms of extension of <strong>the</strong> semantic features prototypically<br />
associated with feminine and masculine gender, nor with concept associations.<br />
Never<strong>the</strong>less, <strong>the</strong>re are behavioural consistencies: non-neuter gender is often<br />
associated with (a) plurality, (b) specific interpretation, (c) individuatedness, and<br />
(d) semantic roles.<br />
in <strong>the</strong> residue gender. More specifically he accounts for <strong>the</strong> gender of Russian words for ‘fork’<br />
and ‘knife’ to a Russian popular superstition according to which if a knife is dropped a male<br />
guest will come, while if a fork is dropped a female guest can be expected. That’s why ‘knife’<br />
in Russian is masculine and ‘fork’ is feminine. Of course <strong>the</strong>se are post hoc explanations of an<br />
apparently arbitrary phenomenon.<br />
1 . Slightly different, but connected, meaning is embodied by feminine gender in Italian word<br />
pairs, such as cassetto (m.) ‘drawer’ – cassetta (f.) ‘box’, cesto (m.) – cesta (f.) ‘corb’, where <strong>the</strong> feminine<br />
gender denotes a bigger size of an object (e.g., [+ big]), often more suitable as a container.