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Grammatical Gender In Germanic Language

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A survey of grammatical gender in selected Germanic languages

This paper will investigate the grammatical gender in a number of Germanic languages, namely, Icelandic, German, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Dutch and English. Issue concerning the number of the genders, how nouns are assigned to the genders, and how the genders are marked or in agreement with will be discussed.

1. Introduction to grammatical gender

The word ‘gender’ comes from Latin genus via Old French gendre which originally means ‘kind’ or ‘sort’ (Corbett, 2006). According to Hockett (as cited in Corbett, 2006, p. 749), ‘gender’ refers to kinds or classes of noun that are “reflected in the behavior of associated words.”, in other words, reflected by ‘agreement’. Noun is sorted …show more content…

Nouns can be separated into two main inflectional classes, strong and weak declensions, based on gender and case endings. Icelandic has a vast number of word forms owing to its strongly inflectional nature. Examples of common morphemes are -ur, -inn (strong) or -i (weak) for masculine singular nominative, -Ø, -in (strong) or -a (weak) for feminine singular nominative, and -Ø, -ið, -t (strong) or -a (weak) for neuter singular nominative. Pronouns (except relative pronouns), free definite articles, adjectives, past participles, and certain numerals (ordinals and the cardinals from one to four) have to be in agreement with the noun’s gender, case and number (Grönberg, …show more content…

Definiteness, attributive and predicative adjectives, and anaphoric pronouns have to be inflected in agreement with gender of the nouns. Besides, there are a number of gender related derivational suffixes. Some of them indicate biological sex, for example –inde, -ske ‘-ess’. Others trigger grammatical gender, such as, nouns with the agent suffix ¬–er and abstract nouns from adjectives with –hed are non-neuter; abstract nouns derived from verbs by the zero suffix are neuter, for example, beløb ‘amount’ from at beløbe sig ‘to amount’ (Haberland, 1994).

Swedish
Gender in Swedish is viewed as covert that it is shown in agreement forms in the singular only, i.e. in definite and indefinite articles, adjectives in attributive and predicative position, personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, some possessive and some indefinite pronouns (Hornscheidt, 2003).

Norwegian
In Norwegian, there is in general very little agreement, for example, the verbal agreement between the verb and the subject is absent. Thus, the expression of gender is substantially restricted to agreement internal to the determiner phrase, such as adjective-noun agreement as well as agreement on indefinite articles, and possessive and demonstrative determiners (Rodina & Westergaard,

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