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Gender in the English language has been the focus of two distinct debates. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States Grammar is the field of Linguistics that covers the Rules governing the use of any given natural language. English grammar is a body of rules ( Grammar) specifying how phrases and sentences are constructed in the English language. In Traditional grammar, a contraction is the formation of a new Word from one or more individual words Disputed English grammar denotes disagreement about whether given constructions constitute correct English. A compound is a word composed of more than one Free morpheme. In the English language an English Honorific is something that is attached to but not usually part of a name e The personal pronouns of English can have various forms according to gender, number, person, and case. In the English Language, Nouns are inflected for Grammatical number —that is singular or Plural. This article is focused mainly on usage of English relative clauses Principal parts A regular English verb has only one principal part, the infinitive or dictionary form (which is identical to the simple present tense for all persons and This is a paradigm of English verbs that is a set of conjugation tables for the model regular verbs and for some of the most common irregular verbs The English language has a large number of Irregular verbs. In the great majority of these the Past participle and/or Past tense is In the English language, a modal auxiliary verb is an Auxiliary verb (or helping verb) that can modify the Grammatical mood (or mode Mid twentieth century academics raised questions about whether English can be rightly said to possess grammatical gender. The twentieth century of the Common Era began on English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States In Linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called Noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words every noun must belong Second wave feminism promoted minimization of gender reference in language generally. Second-wave feminism refers to a period of Feminist activity which began during the 1960s and lasted through the late 1970s Gender comprises a range of differences between men and women extending from the biological to the social 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). The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. The morphology of the Old English language is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more highly inflected.
- Within the noun phrase, determiners and adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun. A determiner is a Noun modifier that expresses the reference of a noun or noun phrase including quantity rather than its attributes as expressed In Grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a Noun or Pronoun, giving more information about the In Languages agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase
- The third person personal pronouns and Interrogative/relative pronouns were chosen according to grammatical gender. The third-person narrative is a Narrative mode applying the third person. Personal pronouns are Pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common Nouns. A relative pronoun is a Pronoun that marks a Relative clause within a larger sentence.
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 | ||
| 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). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (ISBN 0-521-43146-8 presents a comprehensive descriptive grammar of English.
- ^ '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
English grammar is a body of rules ( Grammar) specifying how phrases and sentences are constructed in the English language. Gender-neutral language, gender-inclusive language, or gender neutrality is language use that aims at minimizing assumptions regarding the Gender English is a West Germanic language which originated from the Anglo-Frisian Dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlersDapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic