User:CapnPrep/Gender in English

Huddelston and Pullum

CGEL 5.17 p. 484–99

English differs from languages like French and German in two important respects. In the first place, there is no gender agreement between dependents and head noun within NP structure… Gender is not an inflectional category in English. Gender classes can be differentiated only on the basis of relations with pronouns…

Secondly, the choice of pronoun is determined by denotation or reference, not by purely syntactic properties of the antecedent. We have observed that in French and German, nouns denoting males and females are generally masculine and feminine respectively, but for the rest the gender of a noun is not predictable from its meaning. The dictionary entries for French château and maison, German Garten, Wand, and Haus must explicitly record their gender, but no lexical specification of this kind is needed in English.

Because of these differences some linguists argue that English simple has no gender system, that the category of gender is irrelevant to English. That is not the view we take here: we regard the differences between English and French or German as a difference in the degree to which gender is grammaticalised in these languages, not in whether or not they have a gategory of gender. In French and German, agreement between pronoun and antecedent works in a very similar way to agreement between dependent article or adjective and head noun, but not identically: it is somewhat more semantically oriented. And restrictions on pronoun-antecedent pairing in Enlish have sufficient in common with those obtaining in French and German to justify treating them as involving agreement of gender. Note in this connection that while pronoun choice in English depends on the meaning or reference of the antecedent there are places where the linguistic form of the antecedent restricts the choice of pronoun. Compare, for example:

[3] a. The dog has lost his/its bone.
    b. Fido has lost his/*its bone.

The dog and Fido could be used to refer to the same male animal, but the fact that the latter has a proper noun as head excludes the use of the neuter pronoun it that is found as as alternative to he in [a]. Similarly with human babies:

[4] a. Her baby had lost its rattle.
    b. *Her son / *Max had lost its rattle.

Again, her baby, her son, and Max could all be used to refer to the same person, but only the first permits neuter it as pronoun.

We will say, therefore, that English does have gender, although it is only weakly grammaticalised, being based purely on pronoun agreement. There are two systems of pronoun-antecedent agreement to consider, one involving the personal pronouns (which agree with their antecedent in person and number as well as gender), the other the relative pronouns who and which.

17.2.2 She with non-females (p. 488)

Countries considered as political entities. She is not used when the country is considered as a geographical entity, and it is very marginal when the country name is used for a sporting team.
Ships represent the classic case of this extended use of she, but it is found with other kinds of inanimates, such as cars. There is considerable variation among speakers as to how widely they make use of this kind of personification. It is often found with non-anaphoric uses of she: Here she is at last (referring to a ship or bus, perhaps), Down she comes (with she referring, say, to a tree that is being felled).

17.3 who vs which

contrast in gender as personal vs non-personal

This second gender system differs from the one that figures in personal pronoun agreement in two main respects: (a) it applies with plurals no less than with singulars; and (b) no distinction is made according to whether the antecedent denotes a male or female.

Imperfect match between which vs who and it vs he/she

(i) Who, unlike she, is not used with nouns denoting ships, etc.

The ship, which/*who was on its/her maiden voyage, …

(ii) Human collectives can take who, but not he or she.

The committee, who haven't yet completed their/*his report, …

The committee, which hasn't yet completed its/*his report, …

(iii) Which can itself serve as antecedent to he or she

That's the dog who attacked his/?its owner.

That's the dog which attacked its/his owner.

Quirk et al

p. 314-18, 5.104-111

In English, unlike many other related languages, nouns, determiners, and adjectives have no inflectionally-marked gender distinctions. Some 3rd person pronouns and wh-pronouns do, however, express natural gender distinctions:

it, which, etc. [NONPERSONAL] contrasts with the following:

who, whom, etc. [PERSONAL]

he, himself, etc. [MASCULINE, chiefly PERSONAL]

she, herself, etc. [FEMININE, chiefly PERSONAL]

Gender in English nouns may be described as 'notional' or 'covert' in contrast to the 'grammatical' or 'overt' gender of nouns in languages such as French, German, and Russian; that is, nouns are classified not grammatically, but semantically, according to their coreferential relations with personal, reflexive, and wh-pronouns. We use the terms MALE and FEMALE in reference to the 'covert' gender of nouns, as distinct from the 'overt' gender of pronouns.

The patterns of pronoun coreference for singular nouns give us a set of nine gender classes as illustrated in Fig 5.104:

(a) male (brother) who-he
(b) female (sister) who-she
(c) dual (doctor) who-he/she
(d) common (baby, personified animals) who-he/she/it, which-it
(e) collective (family) which-it, who-they
(f) higher male animal (bull) which-he/it, (who)-he
(g) higher female animal (cow) which-she/it, (who)-she
(h) lower animal (ant) which-it (he/she)
(i) inanimate (box) which-it

animate (a-h) vs inanimate (i) personal (a-e) vs non-personal (d-h) animate

5.105 (a/b) two types: "Type (i) is morphologically unmarked between male and female, whereas in Type (ii) the two gender forms have a derivational relationship. The derivational suffixes are not productive, however."

5.109 (f/g) Male/female gender distinctions in animal nouns are maintained by people with a special concern (for example with pets), eg: cock and rooster for the male and hen for the female. In general, in nonexpert contexts there is no need to make a gender distinction, such as dog bitch and stallion mare. We can then use one term to cover both sexes, as in the case of dog and lion, or use a different term, eg: horse to cover both stallion and mare.

5.110 However, lower animals may also be viewed as higher animals… We make no claim for the categories 'higher/lower animals' to parallel the biological classification. Some animals require finer gender distinctions in the language than others… He and she are only likely to be used for animals with which man, 'the speaking animal', has the closest connections (in particular the domesticated animals).

5.111 Names of countries have different gender depending on their use.

As geographical units, they are treated as class (i), ie inanimate.
As political/economic units, the names of countries are often feminine, ie class (b) or (g).
In sports, the teams representing their countries can be referred to by the name of the country used as a personal collective noun, ie class (e).

Inanimate entities, such as ships, towards which we have an intense and close personal relationship, may be referred to by personal pronouns… In nonstandard and Australian English, there is extension of she references to include those of antipathy as well as affection. eg: She's an absolute bastard, this truck.

Poutsma 1914

Part II The Parts of Speech, Section I, A (Nouns, adjectives and articles)

(p. 343) Of the Old English terminations used to form feminines only two have left traces in Modern English:

en, which is still seem[sic] in vixen. Vixen is derived from vox, in Old English a dialectical variety of fox.
(e)stre, which is still seen in 1) spinster; 2) fibster, huckster, maltster, punster, seamster, songster, tapster, trickster; 3) many proper names of persons, such as Baxter, Bowster, Webster; 4) oldster, youngster; 5) teamster, tonguester.

The words in -ster have long since ceased to be felt as nouns denoting female agents. Hence the formation of such words as seamstress and songstress. Spinster is the only word in -ster which has retained an exclusively feminine meaning, but is no longer a nomen actoris, meaning only unmarried woman.

Deborah Cameron, "Gender and the English Language"

The Handbook of English Linguistics, Bas Aarts and April McMahon (eds), Malden MA, Blackwell 2006, p. 724-741

(p. 735) The question of how gender is represented in language is not just about gender as a grammatical category. Grammatical gender is only one of the linguistic resources that may be used to mark social gender. Languages in which gender is not a grammatical category, such as Finnish, are not by that token lacking any means to represent the distinction between men and women. Even in languages where gender is a pervasive grammatical category — all nouns are assigned to gender classes and there is extensive agreement marking on, for instance, adjectives and articles — it may not be used consistently or exclusively to mark social gender, either because the noun classification is based on another semantic distinction (e.g. animate/inanimate, as in Algonquian languages) or because it is based on formal rather than semantic criteria (leading to 'anomalies' like the German Mädchen, 'girl', which is neuter rather than feminine, as are all nouns ending in -chen). In modern English gender is a grammatical category, based largely on the semantic features of animacy and sex/gender reference, but it is not particularly pervasive: agreement (the defining feature of a grammatical gender system) is limited to third person singular pronouns. These pronouns are significant for the representation of gender in English, but they are not the whole story.

The now widespread, at least in American English, use of guys to address or refer to a group of either gender or both, as in 'hey, you guys.' This usage exemplifies another common pattern in the representation of gender: a term like guy, originally referring to men only, can become generalized to encompass women, but the opposite pattern of generalization is rarely observed, because applying female-referring terms to men implies a downgrading of status which is resisted. Thus when a masculine personal name is widely adopted to name girls, it will generally lose its currency as a name for boys (cf. Beverly, Evelyn, and increasingly, Robin). This kind of pattern suggests that the linguistic marking of gender is not just a matter of distinguishing men and women, but may also be about marking their relative status.