The category of gender

The category of gender in English is a controversial subject. The majority of linguists stick to the opinion that there is no grammatical category of gender in modern English. The maintain that in modern English the biological division of masculine and feminine genders is render only by lexical means: special words (boy, girl), lexical affixes (actor, actress), special derivatives (he-cat, she-cat, male nurse).

The category of gender linguistically may be either meaningful (rendering the actual sex-based features of the reference) or formal. In Russian the category of gender is meaningful only for animate nouns but for inanimate nouns it is formal. In English gender is a meaningful category practically for all nouns (the exception takes place only with none-person animate nouns) because it reflects the real gender attributes of the referent denoted. It is realized through obligately correspondence of every noun to the third-person singular pronouns: he, she, it. Thus personal pronouns are gender classifies in English.

Gender is a constant feature category (it is expressed not through variable forms of words but through nounal classification: each noun belongs to only one of three genders) but there is a group of nouns in English which can denote either a female or a male in different context: the common gender nouns (professor, president, friend, doctor, etc.). For them the category of gender is a variable feature of category.

When there is no contextual need to specify the sex of the referent common gender nouns are substituted by the masculine pronoun (every student must do his best). There are some cases of transposition when nouns of neuter gender are used as if they denote female or male beings and are substituted by the pronouns he or she. In most case such used as stylistically colored. It is known as a stylistically device of personification and takes place in some traditionally fixed contexts (vessel -she, Britain -she, the sea -she, death - he, etc.).

Death is the only freedom I will know

I hear his black wings beating about me.

The category of case

Case is the morphological category of the noun showing the relations of the nounal referent to other objects. A peculiar category of case has developed in modern English. It is realized by the opposition of the unmarked "common" case (direct case) and the only "oblique" (косвенный) case form. The possessive (genitive) marked by the possessive postpositional particle. As we have already mentioned only animate nouns are characterized by the category of the case. The group of inanimate nouns which are able to acquire the form of the possessive case is rather limited. The following semantic subtypes of the genitive can be distinguished:

1) The genitive of possessor (boy's toy)

2) The genitive of the whole (boy's hand)

3) The genitive of agent (the subject of action) (boy's action)

4) The genitive of patient (the object of action) (the hostage's release)

5) The genitive of destination (women's clothes)

6) The genitive of quantity (a three miles' distance from here)

7) The genitive of qualification (a girl's voice)

8) The adverbial genitive (usually of place and time modification) (yesterday's talk, London's building).

As is clear from the description given the genitive does not always denote "possession" that's why the term "genitive" is more accrued that the term "possessive" those both of them are widely used in linguistics.

Sometimes all the semantic types of the genitive are united into two groups: those denoting possession and those denoting qualification. This subdivision is grammatically relevant because in the first case the articles and attributes modify the noun in the genitive case itself, for example, the young man's son; in the second case they modify the noun which follows the one in the genitive case, for example, a pleasant five minutes' work.

Лекция 5 (14.10.15)