THE CATEGORY OF GENDER

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 446.

The category of gender is a lexico-grammatical category of nouns which reveals their ability to be attached to certain forms of adjectives, verbs and other parts of speech.

The category of gender is not typical of English but it did exist in Old English. Nouns in Old English were classified into gender groups: masculine, feminine and neuter. This classification had a formal character as it was based on the agreement of a noun with an adjective or a demonstrative pronoun. The loss of the category of case caused the loss of the category of gender, and it had disappeared by the end of the middle-English period. But it exists in such languages as Russian, German, French and is marked by means of special endings (Russian) or articles (German, French).

In English there are certain norms of gender marking. The masculine gender is considered to be the norm in the use of lexical and grammatical units. Some scientists think that domination of male properties in the language dates back to the story about Adam and Eve. The feminine gender is associated with certain markers, thus with the idea of derivation and subordination. Some scientists go too far to claim that s in the pronoun she is a prefix added to the male pronoun he. There is also a point of view that the word female is derived from the word male. In reality, the noun female was derived from the Latin word femella.

In English there are no formal signs to establish this category. One cannot use the method of binary oppositions. Some linguists, however, try to prove the existence of the category of gender assuming that many nouns can be easily substituted by the pronouns he, she, it. These pronouns point at the biological sex or inanimateness of the object. Thus, inanimate things acquire the neuter gender, animate objects – masculine or feminine.

One can prove the semantic character of the category of gender by the fact that one and the same noun can be substituted by different pronouns:

e. g. love (it, he); moon (it, she).

Real sex distinctions can be shown in English with the help of lexical or derivational means:

a) the words: cock – hen, boy – girl, brother – sister, bull – cow, etc.;

b) combined words: he-goat, she-goat, Tom-cat, Pussy-cat, man-doctor, woman-doctor, boy-friend, girl-friend, male reader, female reader, etc.;

The element man at the beginning of a word always denotes a male (man-servant); when it is placed at the end of a word, it can denote either a male or a female.

e. g. She was chairman of the club.

c) derivational suffixes: wait-er – wait-ress, lion – lion-ess (Cf. учитель-ница, доктор-ша).

Occasionally names of occupations have female forms: sculptress, actress, usherette, but many observers state that a woman who acts in films will rather identify herself as an actor in an interview, not as an actress.

In the past many universally used nouns were exclusively masculine in gender although they were applied to both sexes. To avoid discriminatory forms there appeared alternative forms in the language:

a postman – a letter carrier, a postal worker;

a fireman – a fire fighter;

a businessman – a business leader, a merchant, an industrialist;

a cameraman – a photographer, a camera operator;

a chairman – a chairperson, a chair, a moderator, a department head;

a craftsman – a craftsworker, an artisan;

a deliveryman – a delivery person, delivery driver;

a draftsman – a drafter;

a forefather – an ancestor;

a makeup man – a makeup artist;

mankind – humankind, humanity;

brotherhood – unity, community;

manpower – work force, personnel, workers;

men – humans, human beings, people, persons;

a policeman – a police officer;

a salesman – a salesperson, a salesclerk;

a showman – a performer;

a soundman – a sound technician.

Sometimes different authors employ personification treating inanimate things as having masculine or feminine gender. In most cases everything depends on the author's vision but there are some traditional cases of personification. Thus, ships, vehicles, countries, spring, dawn, the Moon, the Earth are associated with the feminine gender while death, war, the Sun – with the masculine.