Gender in English

Nouns in English do not fall into different grammatical classes of the sort found in Latin. As we have seen in the discussion on the lexicon, English nouns do split up into classes, but the split is not unrelated to the meaning and is not reflected in syntactic linkage. Consider the examples in (18).

The pronoun she is used in reference to a female, he in reference to a male and it in reference to an entity that is neither male nor female. In contrast, there is no obvious reason why the Latin noun mensa (table) is said to have feminine gender, nor why hortus (garden) is labelled ‘masculine’ and oppidum (town) is labelled ‘neuter’. Despite the simplicity of the (typical) examples in (18), English usage is not without its subtleties. It is said that some speakers of English refer to cars and boats as though they were female, as in She’s a wonderful car, but this usage appears to be falling into disuse.

Reference to babies and animals varies. Parents of a baby and owners of, in particular, cats and dogs, know the sex of their child or animal and use he or she. Speakers who do not know the identity of a particular baby often refer to the baby by it (indeed I was about to write ‘often refer to it’). The choice of it is usually caused by lack of knowledge; once particular babies have been introduced as Selena or Rachel, Angus or Torquil, they will thereafter be referred to by he or she as appropriate. But just to demonstrate that context is important, parents can be observed referring to their baby by it, a usage that typically expresses love for the baby.

Similarly, the choice of pronouns for animals is affected by the use of proper names. Example (19a) is perfectly normal, (19b) is peculiar.

We close these topics with a reminder that the relations implicated in syntactic linkage are dependency relations holding between heads and modifiers. Some relations cross clause boundaries (especially the boundaries of relative clauses), but mostly they hold within single clauses.