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

10 Letizia Vezzosi
a phenomenon of the late Old English and early Middle English periods.” Already
in Beowulf one can find instances of semantic gender agreement overriding formal
gender agreement: in (1 ) hlæw ‘mound’ is grammatically feminine, but its
referent is inanimate; accordingly the anaphoric pronoun is hit, namely the accusative
neuter form, and not the expected accusative feminine hie which would
agree with the gender of its antecedent.
(1 ) [Beowulf 2802–2807]
Hatað heaðomære hlæw gewyrcean
…
þæt hit sæliðend syððan hatan
Biowulfes biorh
“Bid the warriors to build a mound … that afterwards sailors call it the barrow
of Beowulf ”
Nor is help provided by standard grammars of Old English, in which gender
confusion is related to inflectional confusion or is at most taken into consideration
only in connection with natural agreement overruling grammatical agreement
(Mitchell 1985 § 69). Even in this case, it continues to be common practice to
attribute gender variation found in the manuscripts to ‘scribal error’, and, indeed,
scribes certainly made plenty of mistakes in copying. Nevertheless, when confronting
unexpected forms, from a heuristic point of view, it would be, in my opinion,
preferable to invoke scribal error only when the evidence clearly supports such a
hypothesis. On the other hand, the regularity and consistency of variant gender
forms require investigation in themselves.
Undoubtedly this phenomenon must be related to a general progressive change
in Old English morphology through which “the functional load of grammatical
gender markers diminish[ed]” (Braunmüller 2000: 9). Conversely, gender marking
was not lost, but, thanks to its diminishing grammatical function, it could be
“used for other purposes […] reinterpreted as a semantic feature in order to express
other grammatical categories or functions” (Wurzel 1986: 9 ). Old English
gender deviations might be a remnant of the original Indo-European categorial
meanings of the three gender opposition (Lehmann 1958): masculine encoded
countability, feminine expressed collectiveness without distributive character, and
neuter represented uncountable mass nouns. In other words, Indo-European gender
marking encoded the concept of [individuality]. 19 But it is undoubted that Old
English already had such a well-developed formal system of gender assignment
19. In Indo-European languages (cf. Serzisko 1982: 99–103) the concept of gender is based on
a quantitative opposition, i.e., definite vs. indefinite, which corresponds to the opposition masculine
vs. feminine/neuter since the feature [+ individuated] includes the feature [+ definite].