Gender assignment in Old English
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Letizia Vezzosi
Abstract
Old English has a three-gender formal assignment system, there are more than scanty instances where the same noun shows more than one gender. The phenomenon has been so far generally neglected both in textbooks and linguistic literature. In the present paper, the author classifies the Old English data, selected through a corpus analysis of electronic corpora and complete literary works on the base of a comparison with relevant data from typological investigations and historical linguistic studies, and shows that Old English gender variance depends on semantic and pragmatic factors that interfere with grammatical gender assignment, a linguistic fact that is cross-linguistically common. More precisely, besides the cross-linguistically frequent semantic traits such as [± animate] [± human], gender assignment in Old English seems to be sensitive to semantic roles. This parameter does not conflict with the previous semantic ones, since all of them can be derived from the more general feature [± individuated]
Abstract
Old English has a three-gender formal assignment system, there are more than scanty instances where the same noun shows more than one gender. The phenomenon has been so far generally neglected both in textbooks and linguistic literature. In the present paper, the author classifies the Old English data, selected through a corpus analysis of electronic corpora and complete literary works on the base of a comparison with relevant data from typological investigations and historical linguistic studies, and shows that Old English gender variance depends on semantic and pragmatic factors that interfere with grammatical gender assignment, a linguistic fact that is cross-linguistically common. More precisely, besides the cross-linguistically frequent semantic traits such as [± animate] [± human], gender assignment in Old English seems to be sensitive to semantic roles. This parameter does not conflict with the previous semantic ones, since all of them can be derived from the more general feature [± individuated]
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Introduction ix
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Part I. Old and Middle English
- The balance between syntax and discourse in Old English 3
- The Old English copula weorðan and its replacement in Middle English 23
- Verb types and word order in Old and Middle English non-coordinate and coordinate clauses 49
- From locative to durative to focalized? The English progressive and 'PROG imperfective drift' 69
- Gender assignment in Old English 89
- On the position of the OE quantifier e all and PDE a ll 109
- On the Post-Finite Misagreement phenomenon in Late Middle English 125
- Syntactic dialectal variation in Middle English 141
- Particles as grammaticalized complex predicates 157
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Part II. Early and Late Modern English
- Adverb-marking patterns in Earlier Modern English coordinate constructions 183
- 'Tis he, 'tis she, 'tis me, 'tis – I don't know who … cleft and identificational constructions in 16th to 18th century English plays 203
- Emotion verbs with to -infinitive complements: From specific to general predication 223
- Subjective progressives in seventeenth and eighteenth century English 241
- Index of subjects & terms 257
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Introduction ix
-
Part I. Old and Middle English
- The balance between syntax and discourse in Old English 3
- The Old English copula weorðan and its replacement in Middle English 23
- Verb types and word order in Old and Middle English non-coordinate and coordinate clauses 49
- From locative to durative to focalized? The English progressive and 'PROG imperfective drift' 69
- Gender assignment in Old English 89
- On the position of the OE quantifier e all and PDE a ll 109
- On the Post-Finite Misagreement phenomenon in Late Middle English 125
- Syntactic dialectal variation in Middle English 141
- Particles as grammaticalized complex predicates 157
-
Part II. Early and Late Modern English
- Adverb-marking patterns in Earlier Modern English coordinate constructions 183
- 'Tis he, 'tis she, 'tis me, 'tis – I don't know who … cleft and identificational constructions in 16th to 18th century English plays 203
- Emotion verbs with to -infinitive complements: From specific to general predication 223
- Subjective progressives in seventeenth and eighteenth century English 241
- Index of subjects & terms 257
