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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.
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Historical development
Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of Modern German (see Old English morphology):
- 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 third person personal pronouns and Interrogative/relative pronouns were chosen according to grammatical gender.
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]
There are two manifestations of gender-based pronoun selection in English:
- The third person singular personal pronouns he/him, she/her, and it (as well as their possessive forms his, her(s), and its, and their reflexive and intensive forms himself, herself, and itself) 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 Class | Example | RP | PP | ||
| animate | personal | 1. male | brother | who | he |
| 2. female | sister | who | she | ||
| 3. dual | doctor | who | he/she, he, they | ||
| generic | 4. common | baby | who which |
he/she/it it |
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| 5. collective | family | which who |
it they |
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| impersonal | 6. higher male animal | bull | which (who) |
he/it he |
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| 7. higher female animal | cow | which (who) |
she/it she |
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| 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)
See also
