Grammatical gender
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In linguistics, grammatical gender is a morphological category associated with the expression of gender through inflection or agreement. As an example, consider the English sentences below:
- John said that he paid for his own dinner.
- Julia said that she paid for her own dinner.
The gender of the subject is marked on the pronoun — "he", masculine gender (male human) vs. "she" feminine gender (female human) — , and on the possessive adjective "his/her". Note that this information can be considered redundant, since the gender of each subject is already indicated by the personal names "John/Julia".
A language has grammatical gender when its nouns are subdivided into classes which correlate with gender, such that:
- Every noun belongs to a single gender class. (Gender partitions nouns into disjoint classes.)
- Adjectives, and possibly verbs, have different forms for each gender class, and must be inflected to match the gender of the nouns they refer to. (Gender is an agreement category.)
The correlation between grammatical and natural gender need not be perfect, and it often is not.
Gender marking is minimal in English, but quite significant in other languages, including most of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs. Since in such languages each noun, whatever its meaning, must be assigned to a gender class, and typically there are only a small number of such classes, the grammatical gender of a noun often has little or no relation to the natural gender of its referent. For instance, in languages with a two-way classification into "masculine" and "feminine", the gender of words designating inanimate objects, such as "Sun" and "Moon", can be purely a matter of convention.
By extension, the term grammatical gender is also used for the expression of other types of natural, individual characteristics (such as animacy) by inflecting words, although some authors prefer the term "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to gender.
Some authors use the term "noun class" as a synonym or an extension of "grammatical gender", but for others they are separate concepts.
[edit] Grammatical gender in English
Modern English is a borderline case. It is arguable whether it should be described as a language with or without grammatical gender. Most of the gender inflections of Old English have been lost, but some pervasive traces of them remain in use:
- Gender-specific pronouns, such as "he" (generally used for male humans — masculine), "she" (female humans — feminine) and "it" (for objects, abstractions, vegetables, and most animals — neuter gender).
- Some modifiers which inflect for gender, namely the possessive adjectives "his", "her" and "its".
- A few nouns that inflect according to gender, such as actor/actress, where the suffix -or denotes the masculine, and the suffix -ress denotes the feminine.
On the other hand, critics could object that:
- English nouns that inflect for gender are a very small minority, typically loanwords from non-Germanic languages (the suffix -ress in the word "actress", for instance, derives from French -rice).
- Aside from the personal pronouns and the possessive adjectives, no other noun modifiers inflect according to gender.
- The neuter gender in English has grown to encompass almost all nouns, including those that were masculine or feminine in Old English.
- English has no truly productive gender markers. An example is the suffix -ette (of French provenance) in rockette, from rocket, but it is seldom used, and mostly with humorous intent.
This was not always the case, however. Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with the following “highly contrived” example:
- Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufod lit. "That broad shield was good and I her loved."
Since the noun lind (shield) was grammatically feminine, the adjectives brade (broad) and tilu (good), and the pronouns seo (the, that) and hire (her), which refer to lind, must also appear in their feminine forms. Notice in particular how the personal pronoun hire adopted the gender of its antecedent.
For comparison, in modern English the sentence would be:
- "That broad shield was good and I loved it."
If one were to replace the phrase "broad shield" with "brave man" or "kind woman", the only change to the rest of the sentence would be in the pronoun at the end, which would become "he" or "she", respectively. Thus, modern English has very little gender marking. This is unusual for an Indo-European language (another example is Afrikaans), but not uncommon in other language families. Sino-Tibetan languages, for instance, usually do not have grammatical gender.
[edit] Gender marking
In other languages, gender markers are both more frequent, and more productive than in English. In Spanish, for example, the vast majority of masculine nouns and modifiers end with the suffix -o, or with a consonant (zero suffix), and the suffix -a is characteristic of feminine nouns (though there are exceptions). Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. Moreover, this pattern is regularly explored for making new words: from the masculine nouns abogado "lawyer", diputado "member of parliament" and doctor "doctor", it was straightforward to make the feminine equivalents abogada, diputada, and doctora.
[edit] Personal names
Personal names are frequently constructed with language-specific affixes that identify the gender of the bearer. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are -a, of Latin or Romance origin (cf. Robert and Roberta) and -e, of French origin (cf. Justin and Justine).
[edit] Personal pronouns
Personal pronouns may have different forms according to the gender of their antecedent. English distinguishes between he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal).
Languages that never had grammatical gender, such as Finnish and Hungarian, have just one word for "he" and "she", hän in Finnish and ő in Hungarian, even though formal Finnish differentiates between humans and inanimate objects.
[edit] Gender agreement
When changes in the gender of a noun induce obligatory morphological changes in adjectives, determiners and other parts of speech (such as verbs) that refer to that noun, we say that a language has gender agreement. For instance, in Polish the word ręcznik ‘towel’ is masculine, encyklopedia ‘encyclopaedia’ is feminine, and krzesło ‘chair’ is neuter. In the phrases duży ręcznik ‘big towel’, duża encyklopedia ‘big encyclopaedia’, duże krzesło ‘big chair’, the adjective for ‘big, large’ has a different form for each gender (in the nominative singular).
Or consider the French sentences Il est un grand acteur and Elle est une grande actrice, meaning "He is a great actor" and "She is a great actress", respectively. Not only do the nouns (acteur, actrice) and the pronouns (il, elle) denote the gender of their referent, but so do the articles (un, une) and the adjectives (grand, grande). Every word changes to match the gender of the subject, except the verb est "is".
Extensive gender-marking (with masculine and/or feminine categories) is common in the following language groups:
It is mostly absent in the following language groups:
The Niger-Congo languages typically have an extensive system of noun classes, which some authors regard as a type of grammatical gender, but others describe as something completely different.
[edit] Grammatical gender vs. natural gender
Natural gender refers to natural characteristics of a being, object, or concept, as opposed to the grammatical classification of the noun which designates it. For example, in languages where nouns are classified as either "masculine", "feminine" or "neuter", natural gender is the state of being either "male person", "female person", or "neither". In languages where nouns are classified as "animate" or "inanimate", the natural genders are the categories "human or animal" and "other". The word "natural" should be understood in a broad sense, here. Natural gender can be the biological sex of a living being, or the social or personal gender identity of a person, or some other natural characteristic not related to sexuality.
It is convenient to distinguish grammatical gender from natural gender, since the two do not always coincide. An often cited example of this is the German word Mädchen, which means "girl", but is treated grammatically as neuter. This is because it was constructed as the diminutive of Magd (archaic nowadays), and diminutive suffixes such as -chen conventionally place nouns in the "neuter" noun class. A few more examples:
- Irish cailín "girl" is masculine, while stail "stallion" is feminine.
- German die Frau (feminine) and das Weib (neuter) both mean "the woman".
Normally, such exceptions are a small minority in a language with gender.
Variation in gender is more common when there is no immediate way to classify a noun according to the criterion which defines the genders. Not only can two nouns denoting the same concept differ in gender in closely related languages, but also within one language. Thus, in Russian the word луна ‘Moon’ is feminine, but its Polish counterpart, księżyc, is masculine. And, in Russian, "картофель" "potato" is masculine, while "картошка" "spud" is feminine[1]. There is nothing objective about the concepts of 'Moon' or 'potato' which makes them masculine or feminine. It is merely a convention. Grammatical gender is thus a property of the nouns themselves, not of their referents.
[edit] Indeterminate gender
In languages with a masculine and feminine gender (and possibly a neuter as well), the masculine is usually employed by default to refer to persons of unknown gender. This is still done sometimes in English, although an alternative is to use the singular "they". Another alternative is to use two nouns, as in the phrase "ladies and gentlemen".
In the plural, the masculine is also employed by default to refer to a mixed group of people. Thus, in French the feminine pronoun elles always designates an all-female group of people, but the masculine pronoun ils may refer to a group of males, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In English, this issue does not arise with pronouns, since there is only one plural third person pronoun, "they". However, a group of actors and actresses would still be described as a group of "actors".
The dummy pronoun of two-gender languages with masculine and feminine is usually the default masculine third person singular, as well. For example, the French sentence for "It is raining" is Il pleut, whose literal meaning is "He rains". There are some exceptions: the corresponding sentence in Welsh is Mae hi'n bwrw glaw, literally "She is raining".
[edit] Gender of non-humans
The masculine/feminine classification is often only followed carefully for human beings. The relation between natural and grammatical gender for animals tends to be more arbitrary. In Spanish, for instance, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah). Different names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent for common pets or farm animals. Eg. English horse and mare, Spanish vaca "cow" and toro "bull". Vegetables are typically grouped with inanimate objects.
[edit] Gender assignment
There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders: according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic criterium), by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or through an arbitrary convention (possibly rooted in the language's history). Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
[edit] Semantics
Modern English is perhaps the most straightforward example of a language where grammatical gender is assigned to nouns largely according to their meaning. Choosing between he, she and it invariably comes down to asserting whether their referent is a male human, a female human, or something else. (Animals can go either way, being referred to according to their sex, or as it.) Although she may be used to refer to countries, ships or machines, this is considered an optional figure of speech. In modern English, the personal pronouns essentially denote natural gender.
[edit] Morphology
In Spanish, grammatical gender is overwhelmingly determined by noun morphology. Since nouns that refer to male persons usually end in -o or a consonant and nouns that refer to female persons usually end in -a, most other nouns that end in -o or a consonant are also treated as masculine, and most nouns that end in -a are treated as feminine, regardless of their meaning. (Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to etymology, by analogy, or by convention.) Morphology may in fact override meaning, in some cases. The noun miembro "member" is always masculine, even when it refers to a woman, but persona "person" is always feminine, even when it refers to a man.
In German, also, diminutives with the endings -chen and -lein (cognates of English -kin and -ling meaning little, young) are always neuter, so that Mädchen (girl) and Fräulein (young woman) are neuter. However, the suffix -ling can be used in other ways, such as to make countable nouns from uncountable ones, like Teig "dough"→ Teigling "piece of dough", and to form personal nouns from abstract nouns, or from adjectives, like Lehre "teaching" → Lehrling "apprentice", Strafe "punishment" → Sträfling "convict" and feige "cowardly" → Feigling "coward". In this case, the resulting nouns are masculine.
In some local dialects of German, all nouns for female persons have shifted to the neuter gender (presumably further influenced by the standard word Weib "woman" also being neuter), but the feminine gender remains for some words denoting objects.
In such cases, terms like "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter" should be understood as little more than convenient labels for three large groups of nouns. They are suggestive because most nouns that refer to males are in the "masculine" class, most nouns that refer to females are in the "feminine" class, and most "neuter" nouns refer neither to males nor to females, but there are exceptions, and many nouns in each class — in fact, the majority of them — have no logical connection with natural gender.
On the other hand, the correlation between grammatical gender and morphology is usually not perfect: problema (problem) is masculine in Spanish (though this is for etymological reasons), and radio (radio station) is feminine (because it's a shortening of estación de radio, a phrase whose head is the feminine noun estación). A similar situation is found in Polish, where masculine nouns often have no ending in the nominative singular, feminine nouns normally have the ending -a, and neuter nouns have one of the endings -o, -e, or -ę, yet mężczyzna ‘man’ is masculine (not feminine), książę ‘prince’ is masculine (not neuter), and kość ‘bone’ is feminine (not masculine, cf. similar gość ‘guest’ which is masculine).
[edit] Convention
In some languages, gender markings have been so eroded by time that they are no longer recognizable, even to native speakers. Most German nouns give no morphological or semantic clue as to their gender. It must simply be memorized. The conventional aspect of grammatical gender is also clear when one considers that nothing intrinsic about a table makes it masculine, as in German Tisch, or neuter, as in Norwegian bord. The learner of such languages should regard gender as an integral part of each noun. A frequent recommendation is to memorize a modifier along with the noun as a unit, usually a definite article (i.e. memorizing German der Tisch - with der being the definite article for masculine singular nominative - and Norwegian bordet - with the suffix -et being the denoter of definite neuter singular, though an article det is used, too, when an adjective is linked to the noun, producing "the good table": det gode bordet).
Whether a distant ancestor of Norwegian, German, Spanish and English had a semantic value for genders is of course a different matter. Some authors have speculated that archaic Proto-Indo-European had two genders with a semantic value, animate and inanimate.
[edit] Other types of gender classification
Some languages have gender-like noun classifications unrelated to gender identity. Particularly common are languages with "animate" and "inanimate" genders. The term "grammatical genders" is also used in this case, by extension, although many authors prefer the term "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sexuality. Note however that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus, which is also the root of genre, and originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. For some examples, see Animacy, and the examples below.
[edit] A diachronical case study: Indo-European
Many linguists think the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders, animate and inanimate, as did Hittite, but the inanimate gender later split into neuter and feminine, originating the classical three-way classification into masculine, feminine, and neuter which most of its descendants inherited. Many Indo-European languages kept these three genders. Such is the case of most Slavic languages, classical Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek, for instance. Other Indo-European languages reduced the number of genders to two, either by losing the neuter (like the Celtic languages and most Romance languages), or by having the feminine and the masculine merge with one another into a common gender (as has happened, or is in the process of happening, to several Germanic languages). Some, like English and Afrikaans, have all but lost grammatical gender.
Even in those where the original three genders have been mostly lost or reduced, however, there may still be a trace of gender in some parts of speech. Thus, Modern English has kept the three-way division of personal pronouns into he (masculine), she (feminine) and it (neuter). Spanish distinguishes between the definite articles el (masculine), la (feminine) and lo (neuter), where the latter designates abstractions (e.g. lo único "the only thing"; lo mismo "the same thing"). It also has a third-person neuter singular pronoun, ello, aside from él "he" and ella "she", as well as a neuter demonstrative, esto, apart from the masculine demonstrative éste and the feminine ésta. Portuguese has a semantically neuter indefinite pronoun, tudo ("everything," used without a definite referent); compare with todo, masculine (e.g. todo livro "every book"), and toda, feminine (e.g. toda salada "every salad"). In terms of agreement, however, these "neuter" words count as masculine: both Spanish lo bueno and Portuguese tudo take masculine adjectives.
Exceptionally for a Romance language, Romanian has preserved the three genders of Latin, although the neuter has been reduced to a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns have masculine endings in the singular, but feminine endings in the plural. As a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural. The same happens in Italian, to a lesser extent. Moreover the Italian third-person singular pronouns have a "neuter" form to refer to inanimate subjects (egli/ella vs. esso/essa, gli/le vs. ci).
On the whole, gender marking has been lost in Welsh, both on the noun, and, often, on the adjective. However, it has one unusual feature, that of initial mutation, where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain syntactical conditions. Gender is one of the factors that can cause mutation, especially the so-called soft mutation. For instance, the word merch means girl or daughter, but 'the girl' is y ferch. This only occurs with feminine nouns; for example, the masculine noun mab 'son' remains unchanged after the definite article, y mab 'the son'. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way: 'the big son' is y mab mawr, but 'the big girl' is y ferch fawr.
Some Slavic languages, including Russian and Czech, make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). Another example is Polish, which distinguishes five genders:
- masculine nouns for male humans (with a special nominative plural that is different from all other classes, and with acc. pl. = gen. pl.)
- animate masculine nouns (with acc. sg. = gen. sg.)
- inanimate masculine nouns (with acc. sg. = nom. sg.)
- feminine nouns
- neuter nouns
There are also approaches that distinguish only three genders. See Polish for more details.
See also Loss of the neuter gender in Romance languages, and Gender in Dutch grammar.
[edit] Australian Aboriginal languages
The Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:
- I — animate objects, men
- II — women, water, fire, violence
- III — edible fruit and vegetables
- IV — miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. This inspired the title of the George Lakoff book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (ISBN 0-226-46804-6).
The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines, and hunting weapons, and the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes.
[edit] Caucasian languages
Of the Caucasian languages, some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian languages, manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only Lezgi, Udi, and Aghul do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, while the Bats language has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes, for male (masculine), female (feminine), animate beings and certain objects (animate), and finally a class for the remaining nouns (inanimate). The Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects.
Among Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz shows a masculine-feminine-neuter distinction. Ubykh shows some inflections along the same lines, but only in some instances, and in some of these instances inflection for noun class is not even obligatory.
In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions.
An entire website has been devoted to exploring the possibilities of inanimate genders in Caucasian languages.
[edit] Indo-Pacific languages
In Alamblak, a Sepik Hill language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the masculine gender includes males and things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow such as fish, crocodile, long snakes, arrows, spears and tall slender trees, and the feminine gender includes females and things which are short, squat or wide, such as turtles, frogs, houses, fighting shields, and trees that are typically more round and squat than others.
[edit] Niger-Congo languages
The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:
| Criterion | Example | Translation |
|---|---|---|
| human (male) | kumba | man |
| human (female) | dia | wife |
| animate | nya | beast |
| other | bambu | house |
There are about 80 inanimate nouns which are in the animate class, including nouns denoting heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Many of the exceptions have a round shape, and some can be explained by the role they play in Zande mythology.
[edit] Constructed languages
In natural languages, gender inflections in nouns are normally accompanied by gender agreement in their modifiers. Even in English, where gender marking is scarce, there must be agreement between the possessive adjectives and their antecedents. "*Jane hurt his leg" and "*John broke her arm" are ungrammatical, if "his" and "her" refer to Jane and John, respectively.
Some constructed languages, however, have gender inflection without gender agreement. A notable example is the suffix -ino, in Esperanto, which can be used to change patro, "father" into patrino, "mother." This particular suffix is extremely productive (there is no atomic term for "mother" in Esperanto), but it is debatable whether this should be accepted as an instance of grammatical gender.
Ido has the masculine infix -ul and the feminine infix -in for animate beings. Both are optional and are used only if it is necessary to avoid the ambiguity. Thus, kato: a cat, katulo: a tom-cat, katino: a she-cat. Besides, there are third person singular and plural pronouns for all three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, in addition to gender-free pronouns.
The Klingon language has three genders: capable of speaking, body part and other.
[edit] List of languages by type of grammatical genders
[edit] Languages without grammatical genderSee Noun class: languages without noun classes or grammatical genders. [edit] Languages with three grammatical genders[edit] Masculine, feminine, and neuter
[edit] Languages with more than three grammatical genders
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[edit] Languages with two grammatical genders[edit] Masculine and feminine
[edit] Common and neuter[edit] Animate and inanimate
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[edit] Notes
[edit] Bibliography
- Craig, Colette G. (1986). Noun classes and categorization: Proceedings of a symposium on categorization and noun classification, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
- Corbett, Greville G. (1991) Gender, Cambridge University Press —A comprehensive study; looks at 200 languages.
- Corbett, Geville (1994) "Gender and gender systems". En R. Asher (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 1347--1353.
- Greenberg, J. H. (1978) "How does a language acquire gender markers?". En J. H. Greenberg et al. (eds.) Universals of Human Language, Vol. 4, pp. 47--82.
- Hockett, Charles F. (1958) A Course in Modern Linguistics, Macmillan.
- Ibrahim, M. (1973) Grammatical gender. Its origin and development. La Haya: Mouton.
- Iturrioz, J. L. (1986) "Structure, meaning and function: a functional analysis of gender and other classificatory techniques". Función 1. 1-3.
- Meissner, Antje & Anne Storch (eds.) (2000) Nominal classification in African languages, Institut für Afrikanische Sprachwissenschaften, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. ISBN 3-89645-014-X.
- Pinker, Steven (1994) The Language Instinct, William Morrow and Company.
- van Berkum, J.J.A. (1996) The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender: Studies in language comprehension and production. Doctoral Dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Nijmegen, Netherlands: Nijmegen University Press (ISBN 90-373-0321-8).
[edit] Other references
- SIL: Glossary of Linguistic Terms: What is grammatical gender?
- Chapter 2 of van Berkum, J.J.A. (1996) The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender: Studies in language comprehension and production, "The linguistics of gender" (PDF)
- The Original Nominal System of Proto-Indoeuropean - Case and Gender
- How did genders and cases develop in Indo-European?
- Susanne Wagner (2004-07-22). "Gender in English pronouns: Myth and reality" (PDF). Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg.
[edit] See also
- Gender in Dutch grammar
- Animacy
- Grammatical agreement
- Noun class
- Noun classifier
- Gender-neutral language
- Gender-neutral pronoun
- Demonstrative
- Synthetic language
- Redundancy (language)
- Inflection
