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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10 Letizia Vezzosi<br />
a phenomenon of <strong>the</strong> late Old English and early Middle English periods.” Already<br />
in Beowulf one can find instances of semantic gender agreement overriding formal<br />
gender agreement: in (1 ) hlæw ‘mound’ is grammatically feminine, but its<br />
referent is inanimate; accordingly <strong>the</strong> anaphoric pronoun is hit, namely <strong>the</strong> accusative<br />
neuter form, and not <strong>the</strong> expected accusative feminine hie which would<br />
agree with <strong>the</strong> gender of its antecedent.<br />
(1 ) [Beowulf 2802–2807]<br />
Hatað heaðomære hlæw gewyrcean<br />
…<br />
þæt hit sæliðend syððan hatan<br />
Biowulfes biorh<br />
“Bid <strong>the</strong> warriors to build a mound … that afterwards sailors call it <strong>the</strong> barrow<br />
of Beowulf ”<br />
Nor is help provided by standard grammars of Old English, in which gender<br />
confusion is related to inflectional confusion or is at most taken into consideration<br />
only in connection with natural agreement overruling grammatical agreement<br />
(Mitchell 1985 § 69). Even in this case, it continues to be common practice to<br />
attribute gender variation found in <strong>the</strong> manuscripts to ‘scribal error’, and, indeed,<br />
scribes certainly made plenty of mistakes in copying. Never<strong>the</strong>less, when confronting<br />
unexpected forms, <strong>from</strong> a heuristic point of view, it would be, in my opinion,<br />
preferable to invoke scribal error only when <strong>the</strong> evidence clearly supports such a<br />
hypo<strong>the</strong>sis. On <strong>the</strong> o<strong>the</strong>r hand, <strong>the</strong> regularity and consistency of variant gender<br />
forms require investigation in <strong>the</strong>mselves.<br />
Undoubtedly this phenomenon must be related to a general progressive change<br />
in Old English morphology through which “<strong>the</strong> functional load of grammatical<br />
gender markers diminish[ed]” (Braunmüller 2000: 9). Conversely, gender marking<br />
was not lost, but, thanks to its diminishing grammatical function, it could be<br />
“used for o<strong>the</strong>r purposes […] reinterpreted as a semantic feature in order to express<br />
o<strong>the</strong>r grammatical categories or functions” (Wurzel 1986: 9 ). Old English<br />
gender deviations might be a remnant of <strong>the</strong> original Indo-European categorial<br />
meanings of <strong>the</strong> three gender opposition (Lehmann 1958): masculine encoded<br />
countability, feminine expressed collectiveness without distributive character, and<br />
neuter represented uncountable mass nouns. In o<strong>the</strong>r words, Indo-European gender<br />
marking encoded <strong>the</strong> concept of [individuality]. 19 But it is undoubted that Old<br />
English already had such a well-developed formal system of gender assignment<br />
19. In Indo-European languages (cf. Serzisko 1982: 99–103) <strong>the</strong> concept of gender is based on<br />
a quantitative opposition, i.e., definite vs. indefinite, which corresponds to <strong>the</strong> opposition masculine<br />
vs. feminine/neuter since <strong>the</strong> feature [+ individuated] includes <strong>the</strong> feature [+ definite].