Evolution of the gerund of nouns

1.1 Morphological characteristics of nouns

Troy and Yates followed the tourists. (Heym) (object)

He (Bosinney) was an architect ... (Galsworthy) (predicative)

Mary brought in the fruit on a tray and with it a glass bowl, and a blue dish... (Mansfield) (attribute; the noun glass is used in the common case)

The hero and heroine, of course, just arrived from his father's yacht. (Mansfield) (attribute; the noun father is used in the genitive case) [11, 115]

A noun preceded by a preposition (a prepositional phrase) may be used as attribute, prepositional indirect object, and adverbial modifier.

To the left were clean panes of glass. (Ch. Bronte) (attribute)

Bicket did not answer, his throat felt too dry. He had heard of the police. (Galsworthy) (object) She went into the drawing-room and lighted the fire. (Mansfield) (Adverbial modifier).

«Stop everything, Laura!» cried Jose in astonishment. (Mansfield) (Adverbial modifier).

The noun is generally associated with the article. Because of the comparative scarcity of morphological distinctions in English in some cases only articles show that the word is a noun.

A noun can be modified by an adjective, a pronoun, by another noun or by verbals [19, 65].

At the end we may say that the noun can be used un the sentence in all syntactic functions but predicate. Speaking about noun combinability, we can say that it can go into right-hand and left-hand connections with practically all parts of speech. That is why practically all parts of speech but the verb can act as noun determiners. However, the most common noun determiners are considered to be articles, pronouns, numerals, adjectives and nouns themselves in the common and genitive case.

1.3 Semantical characteristics of nouns

Nouns fall under two classes: proper nouns; common nouns.

Proper nouns are individual, names given to separate persons or things. As regards their meaning proper nouns may be personal names (Mary, Peter, Shakespeare), geographical names (Moscow, London, the Caucasus), the names of the months and the days of the week (February, Monday), names of ships, hotels, clubs, etc.

A large number of nouns now proper were originally common nouns (Brown, Smith, Mason).

Proper nouns may change their meaning and become common nouns: «George went over to the table and took a sandwich and a glass of champagne». (Aldington)

Common nouns are names that can be applied to any individual of persons or things (e.g. man, dog, book), collections of similar individuals or things regarded as a single unit (e. g. peasantry, family), materials (e. g. snow, iron, cotton) or abstract notions (e.g. kindness, development).

Thus, there are different groups of common nouns: class nouns, collective nouns, nouns of material and abstract nouns.

Class nouns denote persons or things belonging to a class. They are

countable and have two numbers: singular and plural. They are generally used with an article.

«Well, sir,» said Mrs. Parker, «I wasn't in the shop above a great deal». (Mansfield)

He goes to the part of the town where the shops are. (Lessing)

Collective nouns denote a number or collection of similar individuals or things as a single unit.

Collective nouns fall under the following groups:

a) Nouns used only in the singular and denoting-a number of things collected together and regarded as a single object: foliage, machinery.

It was not restful, that green foliage. (London)

Machinery new to the industry in Australia was introduced for preparing land. (Agricultural Gazette)

b) Nouns which are singular in form though plural in meaning: police, poultry, cattle, people, gentry They are usually called nouns of multitude. When the subject of the sentence is a noun of multitude the verb used as predicate is in the plural:

I had no idea the police were so devilishly prudent. (Shaw)

Unless cattle are in good condition in calving, milk production will never reach a high level. (Agricultural Gazette)

The weather was warm and the people were sitting at their doors. (Dickens)

c) nouns that may be both singular and plural: family, crowd, fleet, nation. We can think of a number of crowds, fleets or different nations as well as of a single crowd, fleet, etc.

A small crowd is lined up to see the guests arrive. (Shaw)

Accordingly they were soon afoot, and walking in the direction of the scene of action, towards which crowds of people were already pouring from a variety of quarters. (Dickens)

Nouns of material denote material: iron, gold, paper, tea, water. They are uncountables and are generally used without any article.

There was a scent of honey from the lime-trees in flower. (Galsworthy)

There was coffee still in the urn. (Wells)

Nouns of material are used in the plural to denote different sorts of a given material.

... that his senior counted upon him in this enterprise, and had consigned a quantity of select wines to him... (Thackeray)

Nouns of material may turn into class nouns (thus becoming countable) when they come to express an individual object of definite shape: compare -

To the left were clean panes of glass. (Ch. Bronte)

«He came in here,» said the waiter looking at the light through the tumbler, «ordered a glass of this ale». (Dickens)

But the person in the glass made a face at her, and Miss Moss went out. (Mansfield).

Abstract nouns denote some quality, state, action or idea: kindness, sadness, fight. They are usually uncountable, though some of them may be countables [29, 89].

Therefore when the youngsters saw that mother looked neither frightened nor offended, they gathered new courage. (Dodge)

Accustomed to John Reed's abuse - I never had an idea of plying it. (Ch. Bronte)

It's these people with fixed ideas. (Galsworthy)

Abstract nouns may change their meaning and become class nouns. This change is marked by the use of the article and of the plural number:

beauty a beauty beauties

sight a sight sights

He was responsive to beauty and here was cause to respond. (London)

She was a beauty. (Dickens)

... but, she isn't one of those horrid regular beauties. (Aldington)

In conclusion - semantic features of the noun: the noun possesses the grammatical meaning of thinness, substantiality. According to different principles of classification nouns fall into several subclasses:

According to the type of nomination they may be proper and common;

According to the form of existence they may be animate and inanimate.

Animate nouns in their turn fall into human and non-human.

According to their quantitative structure nouns can be countable and uncountable.

1.4 Characteristics of nouns due the way of their composition

According to their morphological composition we distinguish simple, derivative and compound nouns.

Simple nouns are nouns which have neither prefixes no suffixes. They are indecomposable: chair, table, room, map, fish, work.

Derivative nouns are nouns which have derivative elements (prefixes or suffixes or both): reader, sailor, blackness, childhood, misconduct, inexperience.

Productive noun-forming suffixes are:

-er: reader, teacher, worker

-ist: communist, telegraphist, dramatist

-ess: heiress, hostess, actress

-ness: carelessness, madness, blackness

-ism: socialism, nationalism, imperialism

Unproductive suffixes are:

-hood: childhood, manhood

-dom: freedom

-ship: friendship, relationship

-meat: development

-ance: importance

-ence: dependence

-ty: cruelty

-ity: generosity

Compound nouns are nouns built from two or more stems. (Appendix A) Compound nouns often have one stress. The meaning of a compound often differs from the meanings of its elements.

The main types of compound nouns are as follows:

noun-stem+noun-stem: appletree, snowball;

adjective-stem+noun-stem: blackbird, bluebell;

verb-stem+noun-stem: pickpocket; the stem of a gerund or of a participle may be the first component of a compound noun [24]:

dining-room, reading-hall, dancing-girl.

What we may say for consolidating this part: two or more nouns combined to form a single noun. Compound nouns are written as separate words (grapefruit juice), as words linked by a hyphen (sister-in-law), or as one word (schoolteacher). Derivative nouns are formed from simple nouns or other parts of speech by means of suffixes or prefixes, e.g. a lioness, strength, misunderstanding.

In the present paper we attempted to investigate the noun, the main part of speech in English grammar. We chose the noun as the theme of our qualification work because we interested in it. We used different kind of references to investigate the noun. In other words, we mentioned that we studied the main aspects of English nouns: grammatical categories, grammatical characteristics, semantical characteristics, and rule of correct use of English nouns.

2 EVOLUTION OF GENDER OF NOUNS

2.1 Development and historical view of nouns - gender

In linguistics, grammatical genders are a special type of noun classes where the gender of the subject is referenced by the structure of the word; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few nouns which belong to several classes at once.

If a language distinguishes between gender, feminine, masculine, or in some instances neuter, then each noun will belong to one of those genders: in order to decline correctly any noun and any modifier or other type of word affecting that noun, one must identify the gender of the subject. The term grammatical gender is mostly used for Indo-European (IE) languages, many of which follow the pattern just described. While Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had grammatical gender, Modern English is normally described as lacking grammatical gender.

The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender, although they interact closely in many languages. Both grammatical and natural gender can have linguistic effects in a given language [33, 98].

Although some authors use the term «noun class» as a synonym or an extension of «grammatical gender», for others they are separate concepts. One can in fact say that grammatical gender is a type of noun class, as well as a grammatical category.

A universally observed phenomenon of all language families is that inflexional morphology has simplified over time. The history of the Indo-European family overwhelmingly illustrates this. Theoretical reconstruction suggests that Indo-European had three genders, eight noun cases and three verbal aspects. The evolutionary model is at a complete loss to explain why or how the complicated case system of Indo-European came into being. In this section, we will examine various simplifications which have occurred, and their causes.

Synthetic languages are those in which several grammatical units tend to be composed into one word, and inflexions are used to indicate the grammatical relationships between the words [3, 115]. For example, classical Greek, classical Latin and the ancient Indian language Sanskrit are all synthetic. In contrast, analytic languages are those in which each basic grammatical unit is usually expressed by a single word, and word order is very important for the conveying of the meaning [3, 98]. Modern English is very analytic, so in the clause «the boy loves the girl», for example, swapping the two nouns would change the meaning of the sentence completely.

Over time, synthetic languages have become more analytic, with the effect that in flexional morphology has repeatedly been simplified [32, 89].

«Fixed word-order began to appear within the inflected languages simply as a result of growing orderliness of thought. Relating particles were at the same time added to inflected words wherever the inflexional meaning was vague. After word-order had acquired functional value, and the more precise relating-words were current, related endings lost their importance, and would become assimilated, slurred, and dropped, from the natural tendency of speakers to trouble themselves over no more speech-material than is needed to convey their thought» [10, 97].

The very free word-order found in classical Latin and Greek literature (in which related words in a sentence can be separated by a long distance!) is very artificial. It is widely believed that the word-order used in speech, even during the classical period, was rather close to that of modern analytic languages. «We do not know the exact nature of the word-order which Cicero used when bawling out to his slave; but there can be little doubt that it was as fixed as that of colloquial Italian» [22, 162 ].

Another cause of language simplification is the tendency to drop inflexions to facilitate communication when two peoples speaking similar languages mix. Anyone who has tried to speak a foreign language (or hears a foreigner speak their own language) knows that the word endings are the most easily confused or omitted elements of the words. The earliest form of English, known as Old English or Anglo-Saxon (c. AD 450-1150), was highly inflected, with three genders and several cases. Within the approximate period c. AD 800-1000, there were many Scandinavian invasions into England, and for a while most of NE England was ruled by Danes and this area was known as the «Danelaw». The language spoken by the invaders is known as Old Norse (from which modern Danish, Swedish, etc. have descended), and was similar to Old English in many ways, being also a Germanic language. Because of the mixing of these peoples whose languages had similarities, the inflexions of Old English were worn down.

This shows that language change can happen rather quickly under certain external social conditions, and greater simplification results from greater interaction. In contrast, isolated languages seem to simplify more slowly. For example, the Icelandic language is still very inflected (with four cases) and has changed little since the Old Norse of c. AD 900, because of the isolation of its speakers. This is the opposite of what is proposed for biological evolution: «… from what we know of evolutionary mechanisms, speciation events are likely to occur in isolated populations, and competition will quickly eliminate the less fit of closely similar forms» [4, 105].

The many inflexions of Indo-European have only simplified or disappeared in its descendants. For example, counting numbers of cases, Classical Latin had six, Modern German has four and the Romance languages have none. The only noun inflexion preserved in Modern English is the possessive ending «'s» which is a survival of the common Germanic Masculine, Singular, Genitive case ending. This was the chief way of expressing possession in Old English, so the Old English version of Matthew 12:42 (with modernized words) is «Southland's queen … came from earth's ends to hear Solomon's wisdom. The alternative analytic possessive construction the queen of the South, etc. is thought to have arisen in English through French influence. For the verse just quoted, Wycliffe already uses «of» forms in his 14^th century English translation of the Bible.

The grammatical gender of nouns has been completely eliminated from English. The Romance languages have lost the classical Latin neuter gender, while Dutch, Danish and Swedish have merged Masculine and Feminine to form the common gender.

In summary, natural processes have only caused languages to become more analytic over time and caused inflexional morphology to be simplified. English grammar is the greatest example of the effects of these processes. All evidence strongly suggests that there was a complex beginning for the language families of the world (not just for the Indo-European family, in fact). Thus the evolutionary model has an enormous problem in that it postulates a gradual transition from simple to complex, yet the observed processes are always going the wrong way [37].

The following three sections examine the main ways that languages have grown, and show that these are certainly not the product of naturalistic processes.

From a broad typological point of view, gender can be characterized in terms of agreement, on par with other systems of nominal classification based on a variety of assignment criteria both semantic and formal in nature [18, 147].

However it has been proposed that the specific term «gender» be reserved for systems of nomina classification in which sex features among the criteria for the assignment of membership in given class [15, 69]. In such systems, according to Dah, sex is the most prominent assignment criterion. In fact, he claims, its primacy obtains in whatever system of nominal classification divides nouns denoting animates into two or more classes [23, 79].

In the languages under exam, gender assignment is (or was) based on a set of semantic criteria including sex, along with a number of reported associations between certain formal properties of the noun (derivational and inflectional morphology, phonological shape) and either gender category. Evidence of language change and structural simplification can be observed in Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh. As far a gender is concerned, simplification includes changes in the grammar and distribution of initial mutations, which play a major role in the marking of gender agreement; and changes in the grammar of pronominal substitution (anaphora), which tends in many cases to select the masculine form regardless of the lexical gender of the antecedent, unless the latter denotes female animate [37].

While the above developments are not systematic - they have not yet entered the norm and are still regarded as «grammatical errors» - the fate of Manx and Cornish provides suggestions as to possible, future scenarios in which formal criteria and semantically secondary ones (viz. those that are not based on biological gender) have become irrelevant to gender assignment. To Notes on the evolution of grammatical gender in the languages of the Insular Celtic group paraphrase Dorian, Manx and Cornish died with their grammatical-gender boots off: in the latest stages of their existence, productive feminine agreement could be observed only with nouns denoting female referents, and almost only in anaphoric agreement (a few fossilized noun phrases also preserved feminine agreement in a formulaic fashion). As a final remark, it might be argued that such changes in the gender system are (or were) brought about in the Celtic dialects of the British Isles not independently, but by way of areal contact with English - a language whose gender system is substantially the same as we find in the final stages of Manx and Cornish. However, we know that earlier stages of the English language were characterized by a more complex system, inherited from the Germanic language family. In moving from a more opaque to a more transparent system, English, like Manx and Cornish, retained but one semantic criterion, biological gender. This offers further evidence in support of Dahl's claim about its centrality and corroborates the predictions that are based on his observation [36].

2.2 Modern view of gender and its forming

Native suffixes: indicate the feminine were -en and -ster. These remain in vixen and spinster, though both words have lost their original meanings.

The word vixen was once used as the feminine of fox by the Southern-English. For fox they said vox; for from they said vram; and for the older word fat they said vat, as in wine vat. Hence vixen is for fyxen, from the masculine fox.

Slightly changed and widely used.

That regarded as the standard or regular termination of the feminine, -ess (French esse, Low Latin issa), the one most used. The corresponding masculine may have the ending -er (-or), but in most cases it has not. Whenever we adopt a new masculine word, the feminine is formed by adding this termination -ess.

Sometimes the -ess has been added to a word already feminine by the ending -ster; as seam-str-ess, song-str-ess. The ending -ster had then lost its force as a feminine suffix; it has none now in the words huckster, gamester, trickster, punster.

Ending of masculine not changed

The ending -ess is added to many words without changing the ending of the masculine; heir - heiress; manager - manageress; poet - poetess; shepherd - Shepherdess; benefactor - benefactress; hunter - huntress; baron - baroness; count - countess; lion - lioness; jew - jewess; heir - heiress; host - hostess; priest - priestess; giant - giantess.

Masculine ending dropped. The masculine ending may be dropped before the feminine -ess is added; tiger - tigress; actor - actress; host - hostress; abbot - abbess; negro - negress; murderer - murderess; sorcerer - sorceres.

Vowel dropped before adding -ess. The feminine may discard a vowel which appears in the masculine; master - mistress; benefactor - benefactress; emperor - empress; tiger - tigress; enchanter -enchantress.

Empress has been cut down from emperice (the 12^th century) and emperesse (thirteenth century), from Latin imperatricem.

Master and mistress were in Middle English maister-maistresse, from the Old French maistre-maistresse.

When the older -en and -ster went out of use as the distinctive mark of the feminine, the ending -ess, from the French -esse, sprang into a popularity much greater than at present.

Ending -ess less used now than formerly.

Instead of saying doctress, fosteress, wagoness, as was said in the sixteenth century, or servauntesse, teacheresse, neighboresse, frendesse, as in the fourteenth century, we have dispensed with the ending in many cases, and either use a prefix word or leave the masculine to do work for the feminine also.

Thus, we say doctor (masculine and feminine) or woman doctor, teacher or lady teacher, neighbor (masculine and feminine), etc. We frequently use such words as author, editor, chairman, to represent persons of either sex.

There is perhaps this distinction observed: when we speak of a female as an active agent merely, we use the masculine termination, as, (George Eliot is the author of «Adam Bede») but when we speak purposely to denote a distinction from a male, we use the feminine, as, «George Eliot is an eminent authoress».

Gender shown by Different Words. In some of these pairs, the feminine and the masculine are entirely different words; others have in their origin the same root. Some of them have an interesting history: bachelor - maid; boy - girl; brother - sister; drake - duck; earl - countess; father - mother; gander - goose; hart - roe; horse - mare; husband - wife; king - queen; lord - lady; wizard - witch; nephew - niece; bullock - heifer; dog - bitch; drone - bee; uncle - aunt; monk - nun; gentleman - lady; ram - ewe; sir - madam; son - daughter.

Girl originally meant a child of either sex, and was used for male or female until about the fifteenth century.

Drake is peculiar in that it is formed from a corresponding feminine which is no longer used. It is not connected historically with our word duck, but is derived from ened (duck) and an obsolete suffix rake (king). Three letters of ened have fallen away, leaving our word drake.

Gander and goose were originally from the same root word. Goose has various cognate forms in the languages akin to English (German Gans, Icelandic gбs, Danish gaas, etc.). The masculine was formed by adding -a, the old sign of the masculine. This gansa was modified into gan-ra, gand-ra, finally gander; the d being inserted to make pronunciation easy, as in many other words.

Mare, in Old English mere, had the masculine mearh (horse), but this has long been obsolete.

Husband and wife are not connected in origin. Husband is a Scandinavian word (Anglo-Saxon hыsbonda from Icelandic hъs-bуndi, probably meaning house dweller); wife was used in Old and Middle English to mean woman in general.

King and queen are said by some (Skeat, among others) to be from the same root word, but the German etymologist Kluge says they are not.

Lord is said to be a worn-down form of the Old English hlвf-weard (loaf keeper), written loverd, lhauerd, or lauerd in Middle English. Lady is from hlњfdige (hlњf meaning loaf, and dige being of uncertain origin and meaning).

Witch is the Old English wicce, but wizard is from the Old French guiscart (prudent), not immediately connected with witch, though both are ultimately from the same root.

Sir is worn down from the Old French sire (Latin senior). Madam is the French ma dame, from Latin mea domina.

Two masculines from feminines. Besides gander and drake, there are two other masculine words that were formed from the feminine:-

Bridegroom, from Old English bryid-guma (bride's man). The r in groom has crept in from confusion with the word groom.

Widower, from the weakening of the ending -a in Old English to -e in Middle English. The older forms, widuwa-widuwe, became identical, and a new masculine ending was therefore added to distinguish the masculine from the feminine (compare Middle English widuer - widewe) [31, 54].

2.3 Masculine Feminine gender

gerund noun morphological syntactical

Femininity and masculinity or one's gender identity refers to the degree to which persons see themselves as masculine or feminine given what it means to be a man or woman in society. Femininity and masculinity are rooted in the social (one's gender) rather than the biological (one's sex). Societal members decide what being male or female means (e.g., dominant or passive, brave or emotional), and males will generally respond by defining themselves as masculine while females will generally define themselves as feminine. Because these are social definitions, however, it is possible for one to be female and see herself as masculine or male and see himself as feminine.

It is important to distinguish gender identity, as presented above, from other gender-related concepts such as gender roles which are shared expectations of behavior given one's gender. For example, gender roles might include women investing in the domestic role and men investing in the worker role. The concept of gender identity is also different from gender stereotypes which are shared views of personality traits often tied to one's gender such as instrumentality in men and expressiveness in women. And, gender identity is different from gender attitudes that are the views of others or situations commonly associated with one's gender such as men thinking in terms of justice and women thinking in terms of care. Although gender roles, gender stereotypes and gender attitudes influence one's gender identity, they are not the same as gender identity [29, 89].

From a sociological perspective, gender identity involves all the meanings that are applied to oneself on the basis of one's gender identification. In turn, these self-meanings are a source of motivation for gender-related behavior. A person with a more masculine identity should act more masculine, that is, engage in behaviors whose meanings are more masculine such as behaving in a more dominant, competitive, and autonomous manner. It is not the behaviors themselves that are important, but the meanings implied by those behaviors.

Beginning at birth, the self-meanings regarding one's gender are formed in social situations, stemming from ongoing interaction with significant others such as parents, peers, and educators. While individuals draw upon the shared cultural conceptions of what it means to be male or female in society which are transmitted through institutions such as religion or the educational system, they may come to see themselves as departing from the masculine or feminine cultural model.

A person may label herself female, but instead of seeing herself in a stereotypical female manner such as being expressive, warm, and submissive, she may view herself in a somewhat stereotypically masculine fashion such as being somewhat instrumental, rational, and dominant. The point is that people have views of themselves along a feminine-masculine dimension of meaning, some being more feminine, some more masculine, and some perhaps a mixture of the two. It is this meaning along the feminine-masculine dimension that is their gender identity, and it is this that guides their behavior.

A noun is said to be in the Masculine gender if it refers to a male character or member of a species.

Man, lion, hero, boy, king, horse and actor are nouns of masculine gender.

A boy is playing in the play-ground.

Hero of the movie is not a native of this country.

In these sentences the words «boy» and «hero» are masculine-gender nouns.

The next in the Noun-Gender is feminine gender.