Look up gender in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Gender in the English language has been the focus of two distinct debates. Mid twentieth century academics raised questions about whether English can be rightly said to possess grammatical gender. Second wave feminism promoted minimization of gender reference in language generally. In some contexts the two debates interacted in various ways. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ...
Wiktionary (a portmanteau of wiki and dictionary) is a multilingual, Web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 150 languages. ...
(19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s The 20th century lasted from 1901 to 2000 in the Gregorian calendar (often from (1900 to 1999 in common usage). ...
The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
In linguistics, grammatical gender is a morphological category associated with the expression of gender through inflection or agreement. ...
Second-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist thought that originated around the 1960s and was mainly concerned with independence and greater political action to improve womens rights. ...
Gender in common usage refers to the sexual distinction between male and female. ...
Historical development
Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of Modern German (see Old English morphology): German (called Deutsch in German; in German the term germanisch is equivalent to English Germanic), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and is one of the worlds major languages. ...
The morphology of the Old English language is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more highly inflected. ...
- Every noun belonged to one of three grammatical gender classes (masculine, feminine, or neuter).
- Within the noun phrase, determiners and adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun.
- The 3rd person personal pronouns and interrogative/relative pronouns were chosen according to grammatical gender.
For the function in NP structure, see Determiner (function). ...
An adjective is a part of speech which modifies a noun, usually making its meaning more specific. ...
In languages, agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. ...
Modern English Gender is no longer an inflectional category in Modern English.[1] The only traces of the Old English system are found in the pronominal system, and pronoun-antecedent agreement in English is now based on natural gender.[2]
Benjamin Whorf considered grammatical gender to be a "covert" category in English.[3] [4] Benjamin Lee Whorf (April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941) was an American linguist. ...
There are two manifestations of gender-based pronoun selection in English:
- The 3rd person singular personal pronouns he/him, she/her, and it (and their possessive forms his, her(s), its) are chosen according to the natural gender of the antecedent.
- The relative pronouns who and which are chosen according to the personal or animate (vs impersonal or inanimate) status of the antecedent.
The resulting system can be summarized as follows:[5] Gender classes in Modern English | Gender Class | Example | RP | PP | | animate | personal | 1. male | brother | who | he | | 2. female | sister | who | she | | 3. dual | doctor | who | he/she | | generic | 4. common | baby | who
which | he/she/it
it | | 5. collective | family | which
who | it
they | | impersonal | 6. higher male animal | bull | which
(who) | he/it
he | | 7. higher female animal | cow | which
(who) | she/it
she | | 8. lower animal | ant | which | it(he/she) | | inanimate | 9. inanimate | box | which | it | Notes: RP is relative pronoun and PP personal pronoun. Alternatives are presented in three ways:
slash (/) — used equally; above & below — first preferred; parentheses "()" — unusual usage.
Modern English clearly has a sophisticated system for distinguishing semantic categories, analogous with grammatical gender-marking in other languages.
References - ^ Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002).
- ^ 'English Language', Encarta, (Microsoft Corporation, 2007). "The distinctions of grammatical gender in English were replaced by those of natural gender."
- ^ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 'Grammatical Categories', Language 21 (1945):1-11.
- ^ Robert A Hall Jr, 'Sex Reference and Grammatical Gender in English', American Speech 26 (1951): 170-172.
- ^ Table adapted from Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman, 1985. (p. 314)
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