Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Thu, 13 Aug 1992 17:22:40 CDT
From:         "Natalie Maynor" <maynor@RA.MSSTATE.EDU>
Subject:      RE: Gender
Comments: To: WORDS-L@uga.cc.uga.edu

> >I agree.  But isn't the choice of "she" to go with "woman" a "grammatical
> >consequence in the production of a correct sentence"?  Just as I might
> >reveal myself as a non-fluent speaker of French by saying "La femme est
> >heureux," so might someone reveal him/herself as a non-fluent speaker of
> >English by saying, "The man bought itself a car."
>
> Interesting question here.  Is the last a booboo because of grammatical
> gender?  I think not.  English, as I think I was saying, marks
> nouns for sex.

I also wouldn't call it grammatical gender since English doesn't use what
I think of as "grammatical gender."  We're talking about terminology here,
of course.  I do think that natural gender is part of the grammars of some
languages.  Would you consider my French booboo above an error of grammatical
gender?  I wouldn't.  Now that I think about it, it was not a good example
to use.  I should have chosen something like "La table est vert."  That
reflects an error in grammatical gender.

>  The only proof I would offer is that there is
> nothing from the *forms* of the words that makes it wrong.  You
> have to know what "man" means for it to be wrong.  It's a lexical
> mistake, not a grammatical one.  Its only wrong because men are
> men and "its" don't have what it takes and "it" refers here to a
> man.

How is that any different from saying that la table is feminine and
therefore "vert" is wrong?  I realize that there's a difference in
how that grammatical knowledge is stored.  The use of natural gender
is one thing that makes English easier for foreigners to learn.  But
the fact is that himself, herself, itself are three different forms
and that the correct choice depends upon the gender of the antecedent.
The difference is in how the gender of the antecedent is determined.

> the forms they employ to do it.  So maybe you're right about
> English having 'natural gender.'  That is to say, it doesn't have
> gender at all, but sex.

I do, btw, follow what you've been saying about gender vs sex, and I do
understand that the confusion results from our labeling system.  However,
sex in English has grammatical significance.  It doesn't have to.  We
could get along fine without gender distinctions in personal pronouns.
But we *do* have them.

> >reactions to the thought.  After all, if accusative case still existed
> >in English nouns, even though the inflectional markings of it are gone,
> >presumably grammatical gender would still exist also.
>
> I dunno.  Is there any reason that there couldn't be a sort of
> universal marking for accusative without grammatical gender?  I

I didn't mean to suggest a relationship between case and gender.  I was
talking about the general principle.  In other words, if we still considered
"gift" accusative in "He gave me a gift," even though there's no longer an
inflection marking it as accusative, might we also still consider "gift"
feminine, even though it no longer follows a feminine declension?  (Was
"gift" feminine in OE?  I think it was but can't remember for sure now.
If it was neuter, replace that example with one that works.)  I do see
one big difference, though.  The case distinctions disappeared rather than
changing in some way.  The function of the distinctions was served by
word order and prepositions after the inflections vanished.  When the
gender markers vanished, thus removing grammatical gender as an element
in English, natural gender took over.  Because in ModE "gift" takes
"it," it would be hard to say that it's really feminine.

This is all just thinking out loud, btw.  That's what I love about this
list.  It's perfectly ok to ramble along and realize later that you just
said something stupid.
   --Natalie (maynor@ra.msstate.edu)
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