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

Gender assignment in Old English 10
that this one was about to decline. More convincingly one could then suppose that
a new gender category apparently acquired a new function, that is, difference in
gender corresponded to difference in the perspectivisation of nouns: gender variation
underlies the primary conceptual parameter of ‘individuality’.
The pervasiveness and the consistency of the phenomenon raises the question
whether this perspectivisation function might be simply interpreted as the outcome
of a re-interpretation process of gender due to the decay of the Old English
formal system, or whether it is deeply rooted in the grammatical category of gender.
This chapter cannot provide a definitive answer, but a preliminary and tentative
hypothesis can nevertheless be attempted.
Present Day English represents a language with a strict semantic gender system.
However, there are cases where the straightforward semantic rules are overridden
by emotive and affective factors (Vachek 196 ), and especially in colloquial usage,
considerable variation is possible: humans may be downgraded by the use of it, 20
and inanimates upgraded by the use of he or she, only if they are countable and individuated
(cf. 15a–b). In English varieties and dialects gender variation is common,
and there is general agreement that the determining feature underlying such fluctuation
is the individuality parameter (Siemund 2001; Kortmann & Scheider 200 ):
feminine and masculine pronouns 21 are also used with inanimates if characterised
by the feature [+ individuated], but never with mass nouns (cf. 16a).
(15) a. Is he washable? [thus an American female customer at a store refers to a
bedspread (Corbett 1991: 12)]
b. You said the black knife, you said. I said the sharp one this one he’s fairly
cheap but they use him a lot [BNC KD0]
(16) a. how did they do that [sc. Baking] again? Well, y-you see, you and-,
had – ’twas hearth fires then, th., th-, right down on the hearth, you see, and
they had a big round iron with a handle on ‘n, and they used to put he under
the fire and he’d get hot; then they used to put some – take some fire from the
corner o’the fireplace like and put it here where you was going to bake to, and
put this iron on top of it [South West England (Wakelin 1986: 103– )]
b. they heard the sneck o the door liftin, and the door tried but sho would no
open [Orkney speaker (Wales 1996: 138)]
0. Mathiot and Roberts (1979) give examples from American English in which humans are
downgraded by the use of it: e.g., the burglar broke into the house. It destroyed our furniture while
stealing.
1. Hockett calls the animate gender ‘absorptive’, by which he means that ‘there are routes for a
shift of gender from inanimate to animate, but not the opposite’ (1966: 62).