The Category of Gender

Gender in inflected languages is a grammatical category dividing nouns into classes for grammatical purposes, viz. for declension, agreement, pronoun reference. In Old English nouns were divided into masculine, feminine, and neuter. Formal, or grammatical, gender disappeared with the loss of inflections. The category of gender in modern English is inherently semantic, i.e. it divides nouns into masculine (nouns denoting person males), feminine (nouns denoting person females), and neuter (nouns denoting non-persons). Of the mentioned functions of gender, only the last function — pronominal concord — has been preserved in modern English. The category of gender is expressed now mostly by "the obligatory correlation with the personal pronouns of the third person" and it is based on the opposition of person nouns vs. non-person nouns.

Persons are either masculine or feminine while non-person nouns are neuter. Speaking of person nouns, the strong (marked) member of the opposition is the feminine member; the weak (unmarked) member of the opposition is the masculine member. The common meaning, or the common semantic feature, is the meaning of person; the distinctive meaning is that of sex: masculine nouns are characterized negatively as non-female persons while feminine nouns as female persons. As already indicated, the term unmarked suggests greater generality. When we do not know the sex or when we are indifferent to it, we generally use the masculine gender, e.g. If anybody calls, tell him I'm out.

In the cited example, the pronoun him is not a marker of masculine gender: anybody signifies both masculine and feminine gender at the same time. In this respect it is similar to the pronoun they: Jane and Peter —► They came.

This usage of the pronouns he and they demonstrates the linguistic process of gender neutralization, and these pronouns can be called gender neutralizers.

The sentence If anybody calls, tell him I'm out is an example of formal English. In informal English, him will be generally replaced either by they or by the he or she construction:

If anybody calls, tell them I'm out.

If anybody calls, tell him or her I 'm out.

To avoid the sexist bias of he, the speakers or writers of English use the disjunctive coordinative construction he or she, this is more common in relatively formal style, but can also be found in informal conversation. It is regarded as somewhat clumsy. A relatively recent strategy is the use of (s)he, s/he, he/she in written texts.

As for non-persons, they present two oppositions: living beings and nonliving beings. They are of neuter gender, no matter which subclass they belong to. But they can be subjected to the personification process, and when personified, i.e. treated as persons, they may be either masculine or feminine: a cat —>he or she. It will be remembered that the sex of an animal is not relevant grammatically, i.e. the noun may refer to a female or to a male, yet it will be treated as being neuter, e.g. bull —>calf; cow calf -* it; Tom-cat -*it; lady-cat —► it. This goes to say that sex and gender are different categories in non-person animate nouns; only in person nouns they are, as a rule, mutually related, e.g. woman —* she; a boy-friend —> he; a washer-man —* he; a waiter —> he; a waitress —> she. But: a baby —> she, he, it. These examples illustrate three ways of expressing sex in English: lexical (a woman), morphological

(a waitress), and syntactical (a boyfriend).

Personification does not only concern living beings; it may also affect non-living beings. In literary English he sometimes refers to sun, river, mountain, oak, love, death, time, war, etc.; she correlates with boat, ship, engine, train, balloon, airplane, moon, sea, earth, country, city, the church, Nature, science, Liberty, mercy, peace. In other words, the choice of gender with nonliving beings is mostly determined by the capacity of an entity to exert force: entities of major power are masculine and entities of minor power are feminine.