The Problem of Gender in English

In Indo-European languages the category of gender is presented with flexions. It is not based on sex distinction, but it is purely grammatical.

According to some language analysts (B.Ilyish, F.Palmer, and E.Morokhovskaya), nouns have no category of gender in Modern English. Prof. Ilyish states that not a single word in Modern English shows any peculiarities in its morphology due to its denoting male or female being. Thus, the words husband and wife do not show any difference in their forms due to peculiarities of their lexical meaning. The difference between such nouns as actor and actress is a purely lexical one. In other words, the category of sex should not be confused with the category of gender, because sex is an objective biological category. It correlates with gender only when sex differences of living beings are manifested in the language grammatically (e.g. tiger - tigress).

Gender distinctions in English are marked for a limited number of nouns. In present-day English there are some morphemes which present differences between masculine and feminine (waiter — waitress, widow — widower). This distinction is not grammatically universal. It is not characterized by a wide range of occurrences and by a grammatical level of abstraction. Only a limited number of words are marked as belonging to masculine, feminine or neuter. The morpheme on which the distinction between masculine and feminine is based in English is a word- building morpheme, not form-building.

Still, other scholars (M.Blokh, John Lyons) admit the existence of the category of gender. Prof. Blokh states that the existence of the category of gender in Modern English can be proved by the correlation of nouns with personal pronouns of the third person (he, she, it). Accordingly, there are three genders in English: the neuter (non-person) gender, the masculine gender, the feminine gender.

27. 28 A General Outline of the Verb as a Part of Speech The verb is the most complex part of speech. This is due to the central role it performs in realizing predication - connection between the situation given in the utterance and reality. That is why the verb is of primary informative significance in the utterance. Besides, the verb possesses a lot of grammatical categories. Furthermore, within the class of verbs various subclass divisions based on different principles of classification can be found.

Semantic features of the verb. The verb possesses the grammatical meaning of verbiality - the ability to denote a process developing in time. This meaning is inherent not only in the verbs denoting processes, but also in those denoting states, forms of existence, evaluations, etc.

Morphological features of the verb. The verb possesses the following grammatical categories: tense, aspect, voice, mood, person, number, finitude and temporal correlation. The common categories for finite and non-finite forms are voice, aspect, temporal correlation and finitude. The grammatical categories of the English verb find their expression in both synthetical and analytical forms.

Syntactic features. The most universal syntactic feature of verbs is their ability to be modified by adverbs. The second important syntactic criterion is the ability of the verb to perform the syntactic function of the predicate. However, this criterion is not absolute because only finite forms can perform this function while non-finite forms can be used in any function but predicate.