4. The category of gender

In Ukrainian all the nouns without exception, irrespective of the fact whether they denote the living beings or lifeless objects belong according to their ending to one of three grammatical genders: the masculine gender, the feminine gender or the neuter gender. In modern English vice versa there is no division of nouns according to the grammatical gender on the basis of their morphological characteristics. As a consequence, the noun in modern English does not have the grammar category of gender.

Though some linguists believe that the English noun has the possibility (though quite a limited one) to express the category of gender. In particular, the means of expressing the gender is considered to be the ability of many nouns to correlate with some of personal pronouns (he, she or if). Yu.O. Zhluktenko agrees with O.I. Smirnits'kyj who pointed out that the choice of the pronoun in such cases is wholly caused by the semantics of the noun, which is correlated with it, e.g.: the noun "brother" and the pronoun "he" correlate between themselves not directly and not formally but because of the fact that they both denote the person of the masculine sex. That is why, in such cases, we classify according to the gender not the words as they are but the objects, denoted by corresponding words ("за родом" класифгкуються не слова як таю, а певною Mipoio caMi предмета, що позначаються вщповвдними словами) [5; 45].

Almost the only word building element that has the distinct gender characteristic is the noun suffix -ess, with the help of which we form the nouns of the feminine gender from nouns of the masculine gender: host — hostess, poet - poetess, tiger — tigress, actor — actress (compare the Ukrainian suffix -к(а): лтар-ка, школяр-ка).

In the rest of cases the fact of belonging to this or that sex is expressed by the semantics of the word itself, as it can be observed similarly in Ukrainian (cow корова, bull бик); or it can be rendered with the help of adding of one of such words to the word, semantics of which is not clear regarding its gender. As a result of such agglutination there appear compound words in the language of the

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type: he-goat, she-goat, boy-student, girl-student, bull-elephant, cow-elephant etc. Sometimes in the role of such an agglutinative particle -, a determiner of gender, - the proper name is used, e.g.: tom-cat (masculine gender). In spite of this a large number of English words can be similarly used to denote either the female or the male sex, e.g.: pupil, friend, teacher, wolf etc.

Though the category of gender is expressed very distinctly by the nouns of the Ukrainian language, it should be pointed out that it has undergone considerable changes as well. The grammatical gender of the noun is determined according to some characteristics, namely: the meaning of the word, its morphological structure (suffixes, flexions) and the syntactic connections in the sentence (forms of coordinated (узгоджений) adjectives, pronouns, verbs). The word ending has a great importance in determining the gender of a noun -the name of the lifeless object. The characteristic ending of the feminine gender in Ukrainian is the ending -а (я) and the hard or the soft consonant {шахта, земля, шч, noeicmb), of the neuter gender -o, -e (втно, поле). Nouns of masculine gender usually end in a consonant (чоловт, учитель, студент). In plural nouns of all genders in the Ukrainian language have similar endings, in other words, the forms of plural now, in fact, do not render gender characteristics. That is why nouns that are used only in plural {ворота, вила, окуляры, висгвки, покидъки) do not have gender.

The ending of the nominative case merely though is not enough to determine the noun gender. In Ukrainian there are some nouns of masculine gender which have similar endings with nouns of the feminine and the neuter genders, e.g.: собака, п 'яниця, голова, суддя, клич (пор. шч), промшь (пор. повктъ), Днтро, батько, С1рко. That is why at determining the noun gender the whole paradigm (the system of cases) is taken into consideration: compare, промтъ, променя, променем ... and noeicmb, noeicmi, noeicmi ... Some nouns are used both for the masculine and the feminine gender without any change of endings: сирота, голова, суддя. Such nouns as usually have the masculine gender though can be used to denote persons of the female sex: професор, доктор, кандидат, бригадир

etc. For a lot of nouns - the names of creatures/animals, the gender is something conventional, since they are usually used to denote two biological species, without their differentiation, e.g.: ктъ, собака, кпика, олень etc. The same happens with the majority of small according to their age creatures/animals, they are usually of neuter gender: теля, порося, лоша and even д1вча, хлоп 'я.

Therefore, in the modern Ukrainian language the grammatical gender is to a large extent a formal category, sometimes very little connected with the content of the notion, expressed by the word itself. In spite of this the category of gender has not died out and is perceived by the linguistic way of thinking as the necessary one, since it fulfills an important function of the organization of words in the sentence, in coordinating nouns with adjectives and other words of the adjectival type as well as gender forms of verbs (категор1я сприймаеться мовним мисленням як необхцща, бо вона виконуе важливу функщю в оргашзаци сл1в у реченш й узгоджент з 1менником прикметншав та шших слйз прикметникового типу i родових форм flieonoBa). The English language does not have such a system of coordination that is why the category of gender could not remain for a long time in the language [5; 46].