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Roman Scholars on Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex

Anthony Corbeill

in Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome

This chapter considers how the Romans imagined that the earliest Latin speakers employed grammatical gender. From as early as Varro, scholars and grammarians occupied themselves with cataloguing the ... More

This chapter considers how the Romans imagined that the earliest Latin speakers employed grammatical gender. From as early as Varro, scholars and grammarians occupied themselves with cataloguing the peculiarities of grammatical gender—instances, for example, when gender assignment seems counterintuitive, or where one noun can vary between masculine, feminine, and neuter. This scholarly activity, with little extant precedent in Greek tradition, finds Latin grammarians consistently placing great importance upon the identification of grammatical gender with biological sex. The chapter explains this fascination with “sex and gender” by analyzing the reasons posited for the fluid gender of nouns as well as the commonest practitioners of grammatical gender bending (in particular Vergil). It shows that by dividing the world into discrete sexual categories, Latin vocabulary works to encourage the pervasive heterosexualization of Roman culture.Less

Poetic Play with Sex and Gender

Anthony Corbeill

in Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome

This chapter examines selected instances of grammatical gender-bending that occur in extant poetic texts, for most of which instances scholars both ancient and modern have largely chosen not to offer ... More

This chapter examines selected instances of grammatical gender-bending that occur in extant poetic texts, for most of which instances scholars both ancient and modern have largely chosen not to offer explanations. The passages chosen are meant to demonstrate the potential range of approaches that the poets could apply to the manipulation of grammatical gender. The chapter begins with a survey of visual evidence from antiquity to demonstrate that, with only apparent exceptions, personifications in ancient Rome are depicted with the sex that corresponds to the grammatical gender of the noun that describes them. It then considers poetic texts that provide various examples in which a poet plays with the notion of personification through the exploitation of a noun's gender. It concludes with an analysis of Catullus 6, where sensitivity to grammatical gender contributes to the riddling nature of the poem.Less

Roman Poets on Grammatical Gender

Anthony Corbeill

in Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome

This chapter examines eight different explanations that scholars have put forward since antiquity for the literary phenomenon of the non-standard gender. More specifically, it investigates why some ... More

This chapter examines eight different explanations that scholars have put forward since antiquity for the literary phenomenon of the non-standard gender. More specifically, it investigates why some poets were thought to have greater access to literary authority than others. The explanations range from semantic distinctions to morphology and analogy, metrical convenience, sound, and Greek intertextuality. Informing these various ancient explanations is an assumption that the desire and ability of the most highly respected poets to transform grammatical gender provides tangible evidence of the superior knowledge that these poets possess of the relationship between language and the natural world. Roman scholars attributed to poets the privileged knowledge of an early poetic language, one that had access to mythic and folkloric associations dating back to the period when the Latin language was first coming into existence.Less

Introduction: Latin Grammatical Gender Is Not Arbitrary

Anthony Corbeill

in Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome

This book presents some evidence from ancient Rome to dispute the notion that the grammatical gender of inanimate objects is a convenient linguistic convention, having no correspondence with any sort ... More

This book presents some evidence from ancient Rome to dispute the notion that the grammatical gender of inanimate objects is a convenient linguistic convention, having no correspondence with any sort of imagined sexual characteristics of those objects in the real world. It argues that in the world of Latin grammatical gender, the sex and sexuality behind a given gender was always available for exploitation by the learned speaker. The book provides a historical perspective to the ongoing debate over the extent to which the structure of language affects perception of the world. Using the stable data of the Latin language and Latin literature, it examines the consistent overlap, and even occasional identification, of grammatical gender with biological sex by speakers in ancient Rome, and shows that this overlap finds an analogue in the Latin nouns commonly used to denote “gender” and “sex.”Less

Androgynous Gods in Archaic Rome

Anthony Corbeill

in Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome

This chapter examines the role of grammatical gender in daily religious experience by focusing on androgynous gods in ancient Rome. It shows that the grammatical gender of a god's name matches the ... More

This chapter examines the role of grammatical gender in daily religious experience by focusing on androgynous gods in ancient Rome. It shows that the grammatical gender of a god's name matches the perceived sex of its imagined incarnation. This observation is extended to an analysis of the indigetes, a set of minor deities who seem to have ruled every aspect of daily life, and to whom the Romans appealed, in particular at significant transitional stages such as birth, marriage, and death. A tendency to group gods in sexed pairs is evident in the numerous extant allusions to these deities, as well as to other divine powers. The chapter concludes by showing how this originary state of divine androgyny—whether historical or the product of intellectual speculation—collapses over time in ways analogous to the loss of fluid gender for nouns.Less

A typology of languages with genderlects and grammatical gender

Françoise Rose

in Non-Canonical Gender Systems

This chapter discusses the interaction of genderlects with grammatical gender within a Canonical Typology approach. Systems in which indexical gender interacts with grammatical gender are ... More

This chapter discusses the interaction of genderlects with grammatical gender within a Canonical Typology approach. Systems in which indexical gender interacts with grammatical gender are cross-linguistically rare. They are highly complex instances of non-canonical gender: in these systems, there is at least one value for which grammatical gender is marked differently depending on the gender of one speech act participant. This chapter offers a groundbreaking canonical typology of systems with interacting indexical gender and grammatical gender. The three parameters used for this typology are: (i) same or different grammatical gender categorization across genderlects, (ii) partial or total scope of the genderlect distinction over the grammatical gender values, and (iii) presence or absence of cross-genderlect syncretism. The results show that the most attested type is the least canonical one.Less

The Figure of Exchange: Gender Exchange in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 and Jonson’s Epicene

Jenny C. Mann

in Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England

This chapter examines how English texts shape characters and plots according to disorderly figures by focusing on William Shakespeare's Sonnet 20 and Ben Jonson's Epicene. More specifically, it ... More

This chapter examines how English texts shape characters and plots according to disorderly figures by focusing on William Shakespeare's Sonnet 20 and Ben Jonson's Epicene. More specifically, it considers the use of enallage, a figure that exchanges grammatical genders, in both works to produce a character that shifts between “he” and “she.” It begins with a brief analysis of the term “case” and its use in Shakespearean drama in relation to questions of language and rhetoric. It then considers how enallage, through its manipulation of grammatical gender and case, employs the very taxonomies through which early modern culture already expressed the gendered relationship between Latin and English. It also explains how enallage, despite revealing a gender problem endemic to English rhetoric, is given a new valence in Sonnet 20 and Epicene.Less

“Elsewhere” in Gender Resolution

Stephen Wechsler

in The Nature of the Word: Studies in Honor of Paul Kiparsky

Languages commonly handle coordination of unlike conjuncts via one of two strategies: “Resolution” or “partial agreement.” This chapter examines gender resolution and considers the recognition of a ... More

Languages commonly handle coordination of unlike conjuncts via one of two strategies: “Resolution” or “partial agreement.” This chapter examines gender resolution and considers the recognition of a default or “elsewhere” gender, together with a theory relating grammatical to semantic gender categories. It explains gender resolution in terms of the semantics of grammatical gender within the framework of a theory of markedness. After providing an overview of gender resolution patterns, the chapter discusses syntactic feature computation, syntactic versus semantic resolution, animates and genders with semantic correlates, the origin of inanimate resolution rules and of the featural representations of grammatical genders, and how inherent gender blocks semantic gender.Less

Morphosyntax

Sandra Clarke and Andrew Erskine

in Newfoundland and Labrador English

Vernacular Newfoundland English displays many grammatical features that do not occur in contemporary standard English. Most have been inherited from the regional speech of southwest England and ... More

Vernacular Newfoundland English displays many grammatical features that do not occur in contemporary standard English. Most have been inherited from the regional speech of southwest England and southeast Ireland. This chapter describes the principal morphological and syntactic characteristics of this variety. Though non-standard morphological features are found in all lexical categories, they are particularly in evidence for verbs (e.g. regularisation of irregular past forms, non-past habitual –s suffix, habitual bees/do(n’t) be, the Irish-origin after perfect, bin (‘been’) as a perfect auxiliary), as well as pronouns (e.g. pronoun exchange, grammatical gender in inanimates, existential it, 2nd person forms ye, yous and (d)ee). Among the syntactic features illustrated are negative concord, verb inversion in embedded questions, the complementiser for to, and the Irish-origin “subordinating and” construction.Less

The double life of gender and its structural consequences: A case study from Standard Italian

Ivona Kučerová

in Gender and Noun Classification

Chapter 6 investigates variation in the domain of gender in Italian. The Standard Italian nominal system morphologically marks two distinct genders, three distinct nominal classes (idiosyncratic ... More

Chapter 6 investigates variation in the domain of gender in Italian. The Standard Italian nominal system morphologically marks two distinct genders, three distinct nominal classes (idiosyncratic nominal endings), and two numbers, a combination which lends itself to a theoretical investigation of complex gender interactions. Crucially, Italian nominal inflection also distinguishes between grammatical, i.e. idiosyncratic, and natural, i.e. context-dependent, gender. The chapter argues that while some nouns come with gender determined from the lexicon, others may get their gender valued only via the context. Such a contextual valuation may arise only at the phase level, with D being the locus of such a valuation. Evidence comes from agreement and derivational morphology.Less

The settling of a language

Pieter A. M. Seuren

in From Whorf to Montague: Explorations in the Theory of Language

This chapter discusses the fact that natural languages are pieces of social reality. Due to settling, forms of behaviour become ‘standard’ in any given community. The notion of social reality is ... More

This chapter discusses the fact that natural languages are pieces of social reality. Due to settling, forms of behaviour become ‘standard’ in any given community. The notion of social reality is analysed, as well as the open question of how it comes into being, lending a community its ‘identity’. The processes that lead to the identity of any particular language and the maintenance thereof through time, are unclear. Many linguistic features ‘jell’ in arbitrary ways unrelated to culture or functionality, thereby enhancing semantic opacity and increasing learning load. A counterweight to this arbitrariness is that all languages are subject to universal restrictions, as discussed in Chapter 3. Topics discussed are the arbitrary extension of semantic categories, semantic bleaching, auxiliation, choice of perfective tense auxiliaries, truth conditions versus use conditions, forced creolization processes—whereby new (Creole) languages arise within the time span of one generation, as in the case of Sranan (Surinam)—and to ‘the heteromorphy problem’ whereby humans do not all speak in the universal language of semantic form.Less

North Ambrym possessive classifiers from the perspective of canonical gender

Michael Franjieh

in Non-Canonical Gender Systems

Linguists draw both typological (Dixon 1986) and morphosyntactic (Grinevald 2000) distinctions between classifiers and gender systems. However, these two systems show many functional similarities ... More

Linguists draw both typological (Dixon 1986) and morphosyntactic (Grinevald 2000) distinctions between classifiers and gender systems. However, these two systems show many functional similarities (Kilarski 2013). Canonical Gender (Corbett and Fedden 2016) is an attempt to unify the two systems. This chapter investigates the possessive classifier system in North Ambrym (Oceanic) and argues, using psycholinguistic experiments, that it is an instance of non-canonical gender as more than 50% of the nouns tested adhere to the Canonical Gender Principle (Corbett and Fedden 2016: 503). Nouns which are prototypical possessions and are closer to the core of the classifier’s semantic categories are restricted to occur with just one classifier. Nouns which are less prototypical possessions and further away from the semantic core of the classifier categories are able to be assigned different classifiers. These two underlying factors are what drives internal variation in adherence to the Canonical Gender Principle.Less

Nouns: Enmyn

in Practical Manx

Manx has proper nouns, common nouns and the verbnoun. Common nouns include: abstract nouns, collective nouns, actor-nouns and compound nouns. Manx nouns are either feminine or masculine, singular or ... More

Manx has proper nouns, common nouns and the verbnoun. Common nouns include: abstract nouns, collective nouns, actor-nouns and compound nouns. Manx nouns are either feminine or masculine, singular or plural, and may be declined. They may be formed in a variety of ways. The verbnoun is in many respects the cornerstone of Manx syntax. This chapter discusses the allocation of grammatical gender in Manx; the eight principal ways in which Manx nouns form the plural; collective nouns; the declension of nouns; nouns formed with affixes; compound nouns; diminutives; nouns expressing a state; the verbnoun; and avoidance of abstract nouns.Less

Adjectival Anglicisms in the Plural

Valérie Saugera

in Remade in France: Anglicisms in the Lexicon and Morphology of French

When adjectives of English origin are pluralized in French, they follow one of three patterns: they receive inflection, they reject inflection, or they occur in both inflected and uninflected forms. ... More

When adjectives of English origin are pluralized in French, they follow one of three patterns: they receive inflection, they reject inflection, or they occur in both inflected and uninflected forms. This chapter reveals that although uninflected and variable adjectives do violate the standard native rule of adjective agreement, the constraints that block inflection are French-derived. A second feature of these adjectival Anglicisms is that their nominal counterpart, if it exists, always receives native inflection (des jeans baggy vs. des baggys). It is proposed that the difference in word class, and specifically the feature of grammatical gender, accounts for the contrastive behavior.Less

Learning Paradigmatic Structure

Vsevolod Kapatsinski

in Changing Minds Changing Tools: From Learning Theory to Language Acquisition to Language Change

This chapter reviews research on the acquisition of paradigmatic structure (including research on canonical antonyms, morphological paradigms, associative inference, grammatical gender and noun ... More

This chapter reviews research on the acquisition of paradigmatic structure (including research on canonical antonyms, morphological paradigms, associative inference, grammatical gender and noun classes). It discusses the second-order schema hypothesis, which views paradigmatic structure as mappings between constructions. New evidence from miniature artificial language learning of morphology is reported, which suggests that paradigmatic mappings involve paradigmatic associations between corresponding structures as well as an operation, copying an activated representation into the production plan. Producing a novel form of a known word is argued to involve selecting a prosodic template and filling it out with segmental material using form-meaning connections, syntagmatic and paradigmatic form-form connections and copying, which is itself an outcome cued by both semantics and phonology.Less