Главная страница | Контакты | Случайная страница Автомобили Астрономия Биология География Дом и сад Другие языки Другое Информатика История Культура Литература Логика Математика Медицина Металлургия Механика Образование Охрана труда Педагогика Политика Право Психология Религия Риторика Социология Спорт Строительство Технология Туризм Физика Философия Финансы Химия Черчение Экология Экономика Электроника

The problem of Gender (generic notion)

Gender cannot be regarded as a grammatical category in Modern English because there are no special grammatical means of expressing the category of gender. In English the form of the noun does not show any relations that may be admitted as gender relations.

In Modern English there is no grammatical agreement between nouns and adjectives, e.g. a clever boy, a clever girl, a clever remark, while in Russian we have this grammatical agreement, e.g. умный мальчик, умная девочка, умное замечание. Thus, we may say that in Modern English there are no grammatical indications of the category of gender. But we can speak of the so-called generic notion, which may be expressed in three ways:

1) By means of the lexical meaning of some words: such nouns as man, husband, boy. It goes without saying that these nouns or rather substances expressed by these nouns refer to the male sex and historically these nouns are referred to the group of nouns of the masculine gender.

2) In Modern English there are some pairs of words, such as waiter -waitress, god - goddess, lion - lioness, host — hostess, heir - heiress, tiger - tigress. The suffix - ess serves to express substances of the female sex. However this suffix cannot be treated as a form building suffix. This means that the suffix - ess serves for the formation of new words but not forms of one and the same word. This statement may be proved by the fact that the suffix -ess is typical of very few nouns in Modern English. The same may be said about such pairs of words as widow-widower, bride-bride-groom. In these words we also deal with the word-building suffixes.

3) Among the words denoting living beings we find a number of words which do not indicate sex: enemv, neighbour, cousin, teacher, etc. Nearly all the nouns derived from words denoting agents (doers of an action) also belong here: reader, professor, engineer, doctor. On account of social tradition many words which may denote at present both male and female beings are practically always used of men only. e.g. shoemaker, baker, lawyer.

When a special indication of sex is wanted with the word which does not express any sex, we use such words as: boy, girl, man, woman, male, female, he, she or some proper nouns, e.g. she-wolf, lady-bird, male-elephant, cock-sparrow, hen-sparrow, jack-ass, jenny-ass, billy-goat, nanny-goat, tom­cat, girl-cousin, maid-servant.

When abstract notions are personified, the masculine gender is given to nouns suggesting such ideas as strength, fierceness, etc. while the feminine is associated with the idea of gentleness, beauty, etc.:

Masculine: anger, death, fear. war. hail.

Feminine: spring, peace, kindness, dawn.