Evolution of the gerund of nouns
Morphological and syntactical characteristics of nouns. Characteristics of nouns due the way of their composition. Development and historical view of nouns – gender. Modern view of gender and its forming. Masculine feminine gender, common, neuter gender.
| Рубрика | Иностранные языки и языкознание |
| Вид | курсовая работа |
| Язык | английский |
| Дата добавления | 31.03.2011 |
| Размер файла | 176,7 K |
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A noun is said to be in the feminine gender if it refers to a female member of a species.
Woman, lioness, heroine, girl, mare, niece, empress, cow and actress are few of the feminine-gender nouns that we use.
A girl is playing in the play-ground.
Heroine of the movie is not a native of this country.
In these sentences the words «girl» and «heroine» are feminine-gender nouns.
The most social of the theories of gender identity development are the learning theories. In these theories it is the social environment of the child, such as parents and teachers, that shapes the gender identity of a child. Here, the parent or teacher instructs the child on femininity and masculinity directly through rewards and punishments, or indirectly through acting as models that are imitated. Direct rewards or punishments are often given for outward appearance as in what to wear (girls in dresses and boys in pants), object choice such as toy preferences (dolls for girl and trucks for boys), and behavior (passivity and dependence in girls and aggressiveness and independence in boys). Through rewards and punishments, children learn appropriate appearance and behavior. Indirect learning of one's gender identity emerges from modeling same-sex parents, teachers, peers, or same-sex models in the media. A child imitates a rewarded model's thoughts, feelings, or behavior because it anticipates that it will receive the same rewards that the model received [33, 198].
2.4 Common, Neuter gender
A great many person nouns in English are capable of expressing both feminine and masculine person genders by way of the pronominal correlation in question. These are referred to as nouns of the «common gender». Here belong such words as person, parent, friend, cousin, doctor, president, etc. For example:
The President of our Medical Society isn't going to be happy about the suggested way of cure. In general she insists on quite another kind of treatment in cases like that.
The capability of expressing both genders makes the gender distinctions in the nouns of the common gender into a variable category. On the other hand, when there is no special need to indicate the sex of the person referents of these nouns, they are used neutrally as masculine, i.e. they correlate with the masculine third person pronoun.
In the plural, all the gender distinctions are neutralised in the immediate explicit expression, though they are rendered obliquely through the correlation with the singular. (Picture 2)
Picture 2 - Sex related
In this case, the intersection of masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns having the «correct» correlation with the percepts «male», «female», and «other» is large. The close correlation between gender and sex thus turns the percept of sex into a good predictor of the grammatical category of gender, and vice-versa. This fact may lead speakers of languages employing natural gender into conflating the two ideas, and possibly, paper implicitly suggests, thinking that native speakers of languages with formal gender may perform a similar conflation. We should note in passing that one of the meanings of the word «gender» in English is «the state of being male, female, or neuter; sex».
Thus, in English, the question «what is your gender?» is a meaningful one to ask a person. In Greek on the other hand, a typical Indo-European language employing formal gender, the same question («pio eeneh to genos sou?») is absurd, because it implies the questioned entity is a noun - akin to asking in English: «what is your declension?» [18, 120]
According to the definition, there can be no such thing as «common gender» words either distinguish sex (or the sex is distinguished by the context) or else they do not distinguish sex.
If such words as parent, servant, teacher, ruler, relative, cousin, domestic, etc., do not show the sex to which the persons belong, they are neuter words.
A noun is said to be in Common gender if it refers to a member of species which can be a male or a female.
Child, student, friend, applicant, candidate, servant, member, parliamentarian and leader are few of the common-gender nouns.
A child is playing in the play-ground.
A Parliamentarian should have command over his language.
In these sentences the words, «child» and «parliamentarian» are nouns of common gender. The next in the Noun-Gender is neuter gender.
All nouns, then, must be divided into two principal classes, - gender nouns, those distinguishing the sex of the object; and neuter nouns, those which do not distinguish sex, or names of things without life, and consequently without sex.
Gender nouns include names of persons and some names of animals; neuter nouns include some animals and all inanimate objects.
Some words may be either gender nouns or neuter nouns, according to their use. Thus, the word child is neuter in the sentence, «A little child shall lead them,» but is masculine in the sentence from Wordsworth
For example: I have seen a curious child ... applying to his ear the convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell.
Of animals, those with which man comes in contact often, or which arouse his interest most, are named by gender nouns, as in these sentences:
Before the barn door strutted the gallant cock, that pattern of a husband, ... clapping his burnished wings. - Irving.
Gunpowder ... came to a stand just by the bridge, with a suddenness that had nearly sent his rider sprawling over his head-Id.
Other animals are not distinguished as to sex, but are spoken of as neuter, the sex being of no consequence.
Not a turkey but he (Ichabod) beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing. - Irving.
He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it.-Lamb. neither a male nor a female.
Normally nouns referring to lifeless objects are in neuter nouns. Chair, table, tree, star, mountain, street, book, car, school, paper, pencil and computer are few of the neuter nouns which We use regularly.
Computer has brought about drastic changes in our lives.
Tree is cleansing the air.
Stars are not visible in the day-time.
Books are our best friends.
In these sentences the words, «computer», «tree», «stars» and «books» are the neuter-gender nouns.
NOTE: Collective nouns, even if they refer to living-beings, are used as neuter-nouns.
The army is doing its task.
The police are called to manage the situation.
In these sentences the nouns (army and police) refer to only living-beings. But they are used only as neuter-nouns.
Objects noted for their power, strength, and violence are used as Masculine gender nouns. The sun, summer, time, death etc… are masculine-gender nouns.
The sun is so scorching now that we can not go out now to face him without an umbrella.
The death is cruel. He is as certain as tomorrow.
In these sentences the words «sun» and «death» have been used as Masculine-gender nouns.
Objects noted for their beauty, gentleness and grace are used as feminine-gender nouns. The moon, the earth, spring, charity etc… are feminine-gender nouns [36].
The moon is so bright at this time that she induces romantic mood in us.
The earth is patient. Her beauty is spoiled day-by-day.
As we see, the category of gender in English is inherently semantic, i.e. meaningful in so far as it reflects the actual features of the named objects. But the semantic nature of the category does not in the least make it into «non-grammatical», which follows from the whole content of what has been said in the present work.
In Russian, German, and many other languages characterised by the gender division of nouns, the gender has purely formal features that may even «run contrary» to semantics. Suffice it to compare such Russian words as стакан - он, чашка-она, блюдце - оно, as well as their German correspondences das Glas - es, die Tasse - sie, der Teller - er, etc. But this phenomenon is rather an exception than the rule in terms of grammatical categories in general.
Moreover, alongside of the «formal» gender, there exists in Russian, German and other «formal gender» languages meaningful gender, featuring, within the respective idiomatic systems, the natural sex distinctions of the noun referents.
In particular, the Russian gender differs idiomatically from the English gender in so far as it divides the nouns by the higher opposition not into «person - non-person» («human - non human»), but into «animate - inanimate», discriminating within the former (the animate nounal set) between masculine, feminine, and a limited number of neuter nouns. Thus, the Russian category of gender essentially divides the noun into the inanimate set having no meaningful gender, and the animate set having a meaningful gender. In distinction to this, the English category of gender is only meaningful, and as such it is represented in the nounal system as a whole [26, 81].
CONCLUSION
What could the origin of grammatical gender be? In the job were hint at possible common intuitions of people across languages, and attempt to quantify this assumption by examining the intuitions of speakers of English. Was performed a similar comparison of such intuitions against Indo-European languages, and found that such intuitions do not show any particular correlation with the studied languages. Moreover, it would be meaningful to talk about such a correlation if languages agreed among themselves. Otherwise, if we find a correlation between the intuitions of monolingual speakers of English and, say, Kurdish, we do not have any reason to assume there is anything other than chance involved. Looking back we see that the only agreement that can be observed among languages is between members of the same subfamily (e.g., Portuguese-Spanish, etc.). The more phylogenetically distant the languages, the lower their correlation is (allowing for statistical errors). This hints at a possible answer to the gender-origin question. That all Indo-European languages evolved from a common ancestor is indisputable. It is plausible to assume that this ancestor language employed a gender system, possibly one with a semantic basis. But what could have caused its modern descendants to assign genders such as masculine and feminine to inanimate objects? And how can a «pure» system evolve into the modern chaos and disagreement?
The answer some authors have given to these questions is that the origin of gender is purely formal: some suffixes of sex-differentiable nouns acted as attractors, and created the genders in a purely formal, non-semantic way. This leaves open the question of what caused sex-differentiable nouns, rather than any other category, to become attractors.
Another possible answer is that in some languages the initially semantic neuter gender was lost, and the void was filled by masculine and feminine genders being assigned to previously neuter nouns. Such a process can be observed today in Russian, where neuter nouns are only 13% of the total, and loanwords entering the language go primarily to the masculine gender, but also to the feminine [6, 87].
This hypothesis does not take into account languages that retain the neuter gender, and still assign masculine and feminine genders to inanimate objects (German, Greek, etc.). An alternative hypothesis is that masculine and feminine assignments to inanimate objects existed even in the original Indo-European ancestor. Although such assignments seem nonsensical today, they might have «made sense» in the remote past, at least among the few speakers of the ancestor language, based on animistic conceptions of the world. It could have appeared natural to a particular culture that, for example, a stone is of female sex. However, as the original language evolved, ideas about the stone's sex changed, too. Since there is no objective way to agree on something like the sex of a stone, the «opinions» among descendant languages evolved differently. What we observe today appears as a purely formal and arbitrary assignment, since the original «reasons» have been lost. One prediction of this hypothesis is that gender evolution in such languages should be traceable through a weak agreement between phylogenetically proximal languages. We believe the present work supports this implication, although further investigation of the hypothesis is clearly needed.
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APPENDIX
Formation of compound nouns
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