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On grammatical gender as an arbitrary and redundant category

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 ON GRAMMATICAL GENDER AS AN ARBITRARY AND
REDUNDANT CATEGORY

MARCIN KILARSKI
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

ABSTRACT

In this paper I give an overview of tendencies in the research on

grammatical gender within the Western linguistic tradition. More specifically, I
focus on the recurring claims concerning the supposed semantic arbitrariness,
and formal and non-functional character of this category. Representative
examples are given from every period of linguistic activity, from the ancient
Greek scholars up to contemporary descriptive and typological studies.
Particular attention is given to the most influential works, e.g. those of the
Neogrammarians and European as well as American structuralists within 19th
and 20th century scholarship. While examples have been drawn mainly from
the research on Indo-European, the tendencies described are also indicative of
the research on other families and on systems traditionally referred to as “noun
classes”. Finally, I consider these claims in the light of the evidence that is now
available of the semantic regularity of gender, its discourse functions and
cognitive correlates.

The mere mention of linguistic gender has always stimulated heated

discussions, regardless of whether semantic, formal, functional, synchronic or
diachronic aspects were concerned. 1 In this paper I would like to consider
tendencies in the history of research on gender whose common ground consists
in the insistence on its arbitrariness.
We’ll begin with an overview of the tendencies, which will then be
illustrated with examples from the Western linguistic tradition, together with
counter-arguments offered by contemporary scholars. Generally, these
conflicting approaches can be analysed in terms of such distinctions as
meaning vs. form, regular vs. arbitrary and functional vs. redundant. Due to the
limitations of the present paper and the amount of relevant literature, I would

1
I would like to thank Peter Trudgill and Yishai Tobin for reading an earlier version of this
paper, providing encouragement and sharing ideas with me.
 ON GRAMMATICAL GENDER 25

like to consider only the most representative treatments, as examples of the

attitudes which were characteristic of a given period. Finally, I will briefly
review the evidence that is now available of the semantic regularity of gender,
its functions and cognitive correlates.
In the most characteristic claim that has been made, grammatical gender
has been described as arbitrary, typically in terms of its semantic content –
either referential (with respect to entities in the real world) or lexical (with
respect to the lexical meaning of the noun). Less frequently, a lack of
regularity has been attributed to formal (morphological or phonological)
assignment principles. As regards semantic arbitrariness, examples cited most
frequently involve nouns from the lower parts of the animacy hierarchy, i.e.
inanimates. Other common examples include “problematic” animates, such as
epicenes, which denote both males and females but take only one agreement
form, e.g., G. maus ‘mouse’ f., and hybrids, such as G. Mädchen ‘girl’ n.,
which take more than one agreement form (here n. or f.), and finally sex-
differentiable nouns, by virtue of their relatively small share in the lexicon. It is
a notable feature of many approaches that they accentuate the lack of complete
regularity in assignment, also in the face of the outcomes of morphological or
phonological change, as in the contrast between m. and f. genders in Romance
and c. and n. in mainland Scandinavian, or cross-linguistic differences in the
expression of the sex differentiation.
The insistence on semantic arbitrariness of gender may be reflected in the
treatment of formal assignment criteria and its function. Gender has thus been
regarded as a system of formal classification, motivated only, or primarily, on
morphological or phonological grounds. In terms of its function, it has been
described as a “luxury”, a category which is largely redundant or non-
functional with respect to its role in grammar and human communication,
especially in comparison with other grammatical categories such as number or
tense, and in view of its supposed non-universal character.
The early Greek scholars addressed the issues that were to form the core of
the discussion of gender until modern times. These generally concerned the
inadequacy of the correspondence between natural and grammatical gender, as
exemplified in the status of n. gender, the assignment of inanimates and
individual irregularities in the expression of the category.
In view of the lack of correspondence with the sex distinction, n. gender
was defined by Aristotle (384-322 BCE) as τὸ μεταξύ “that which is between
m. and f.”, and οὐδέτερον “neuter”, i.e. “neither of the two”, by the Stoics and
Dionysius Thrax (c. 170-c. 90 BCE), in contrast to the earlier notional
definition as σκε͂υος “thing” by Protagoras (c. 490-c. 420 BCE). Cases of
irregularities in the expression of gender were provided by epicenes as well as
assignments which were thought of as incongruous, based on proposed
principles. Aristotle tells us that Protagoras suggested that m. gender was more
26 MARCIN KILARSKI

appropriate for the f. nouns μῆνις ‘anger’ and πήληξ ‘helmet’ (De sophisticis
elenchis 173b 20). In turn, Socrates (469-399 BCE), as described by
Aristophanes, is said to have proposed the f. form ἀλεκτρύαινα ‘hen’ instead
of ἀλεκτρυών ‘cock, hen’ (Nubes 660-80). Aristotle himself discussed
solecisms in the use of epicenes and n. nouns due to the supposed
“intermediate” qualities of n. gender (De sophisticis elenchis 174a 1). In his
later attack on analogists, Sextus Empiricus (fl. 200 CE) considered the
assignment of m. or f. gender to inanimates and the presence of epicenes, as
examples of the anomalies in the relation between natural and grammatical
gender (Adversus grammaticos 142-153).
These accounts can be viewed in terms of the dichotomies of nature vs.
convention and analogy vs. anomaly. Among naturalists, for whom categories
were a regular reflection of the object’s qualities, gender was understood as a
classification that reflects natural gender, while conventionalists, in the face of
irregularities in language, regarded the correlation as conventional. We can
here draw an analogy between the arguments of the two sides and the
arguments given by modern linguists: thus a naturalist position can generally
be seen in the insistence on semantic or extralinguistic motivation of gender as
a type of nominal classification, while a conventionalist position would
correspond to the insistence on its semantic arbitrariness. The attempts at
bringing in line the correspondence between natural and grammatical gender
can be seen as a reflection of the parallel dichotomy of analogy vs. anomaly,
with an often prescriptive emphasis on regularity between meaning and form,
or an emphasis on the presence of irregularities in inflectional morphology.
Fully notional criteria were applied by Priscian (d. ca. 530) in the form of
the distinction active vs. passive, based on the properties of the sexes and their
roles in procreation (Keil 1855-59). Owing to the influence of his Institutiones
grammaticae, this interpretation of gender reappeared throughout the Middle
Ages. Thus in the grammars of the Modistae, e.g., De Modis significandi by
Martin of Dacia (d. 1304) and Grammatica speculativa by Thomas of Erfurt
(fl. 1300), the three genders are distinguished through the opposition between
active and passive properties of males and females, with n. gender signifying
an indeterminate property. At the same time, gender was relegated by Ockham
(c. 1285-c. 1349) to a meaningless and unnecessary category, as opposed to
those, such as number, which reflect distinctions in the universal mental
language (Summa I.3); we will later encounter comparable statements in, e.g.,
20th century structuralist studies.
If we now look at the grammars of the 17th century, Arnauld (1612-1694)
and Lancelot (1615-1695) identified the role of gender in the expression of the
 ON GRAMMATICAL GENDER 27

relation between the noun and the adjective.2 While the assignment of animates
is attributed to sex and typical occupations, that of inanimate nouns is said to
proceed on an arbitrary basis, “by pure caprice and a habit without reason”
(Arnauld & Lancelot 1975[1660]:77), an observation based on different
assignments in related languages and gender change within the same language.
In addition, the Port Royal scholars criticized Greek and Roman grammarians
for not treating n. gender in rational terms, i.e. as the absence of the two
properties, and for the addition of common and epicene genders. This approach
can be contrasted with the notional accounts in the 17th and 18th centuries by,
e.g., Antoine Court de Gébelin (1774), and James Harris (1751). 3
The period between the late 18th and late 19th century was dominated by the
controversy over the origin of Indo-European gender. We will first consider
the dominant notional view and then look at the counter-arguments. According
to a succession of scholars (Herder 1772, Adelung 1783, Humboldt (e.g.,
Humboldt 1827), and Grimm 1890), the origin of the category was sought in
imagination and personification, in an extension of natural gender to
inanimates, based on semantic oppositions such as active vs. passive. 4 It is
important to emphasize here the role which was attributed especially by
Humboldt (1767-1835) to perception and categorization, which shape
grammar.
The insistence on the development of Indo-European grammatical gender
from natural gender and the often almost exclusive role assigned to semantic
criteria were eventually questioned by the Neogrammarians. The article by
Karl Brugmann (1889) explicitly stated their arguments. While Brugmann
(1849-1919) admitted the presence of a connection between grammatical and
natural gender, he rejected the possibility of the development of grammatical
gender from natural gender by way of personification, which he regarded as
historically secondary, instead attributing the development of f. gender to a
morphological reanalysis of certain suffixes. The resulting exchange with
Gustav Roethe (1859-1926) illustrates a range of motifs found elsewhere in the
accounts of the nature of gender, particularly in the denial of – or insistence
upon – its semantic regularity, function and universal character. 5
Gender featured prominently in the late 18th and throughout the 19th
century in discussions about the supposed value of grammatical categories and
their role in the development of a language or a nation. On the one hand,

2
Thus, “… the masculine or feminine gender of a word does not properly concern its
signification, but merely says that grammatically it is such that it should be joined to the
adjective in the masculine or feminine ending” (Arnauld & Lancelot 1975[1660]:78).
3
Arnauld and Lancelot would certainly have disapproved of the abundance of genders
introduced in English by 17th and 18th century grammarians (see Baron 1986:95-97).
4
Analogous views were voiced by, e.g., Pott (1836), Bindseil (1838), and Bopp (1857).
5
For an account of the debate see, e.g., Royen (1929:42-141) and Kilarski (2006).
28 MARCIN KILARSKI

grammatical gender was described as an unnecessary component of language

which it is best to dispose of (Adelung 1783) or a luxury (Gabelentz 1891).
The loss of grammatical gender, as in English, was therefore approved of
(Bleek 1872), 6 particularly in view of the belief that gender appears only in
primitive languages and societies, as “a useless encumbrance” which is
“perhaps inevitable at that early childish stage of the human intelligence”
(Farrar 1865:212). On the other hand, in the spirit of the age, the presence of
grammatical gender, as a typical feature of morphologically complex
languages, was regarded as an indication of linguistic development, as a result
of which isolating, agglutinating and inflectional languages which have lost it
were viewed as less developed (Pott 1836, Bopp 1857, Grimm 1890).
Likewise, the presence of gender was considered a marker of cultural
development. The ideal was commonly regarded to have been reached in Indo-
European, gender being a prerogative of its speakers, their aesthetic and
scientific creativity (Gabelentz 1891), and their whole civilization (Miklosich
1868-74, Lepsius 1880). 7
The explanations proposed in 19th century scholarship, particularly the
opposition between a semantic and formal motivation for gender, reappeared in
the 20th century, to be discussed within structural and anthropological
linguistics, and later within purely formal perspectives as opposed to cultural,
cognitive and typological ones. We’ll first consider examples of descriptive
studies in which gender was described in predominantly formal terms,
following the Saussurean precept of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign.
Several scholars voiced their disillusionment with the possibility of stating
assignment rules, suggesting that gender plays a less central role among
grammatical categories, remaining “un luxe linguistique, sans relation avec la
logique” [a linguistic luxury, with no connection to logic] (Bally 1935:66).
According to, e.g., Jespersen (1924:228), “[i]t is certainly impossible to find
any single governing-principle in this chaos.” The loss of grammatical gender
contributes then towards a more analytic structure and communicative
efficiency, in the “perfect stage of complete genderlessness” (Jespersen
1922:347). 8 Likewise, in American structuralism, gender was defined by
Bloomfield (1887-1949) (1933) in terms of arbitrary classes, a claim which he

6
“The more logical arrangement which some Northern TEUTONIC nations (particularly the
English) have adopted, by removing all nouns in which sex cannot be distinguished from the
masculine and feminine classes (or genders), has its undoubted advantages” (Bleek 1872:79).
7
Nevertheless, Steinthal (1823-1899) regarded the presence of gender inflection in the verb in
Slavonic languages as evidence of a weaker Sprachgeist, adding that “besides, it’s the Slavs
who seem to me the most sluggish amongst the Indo-Germanic tribes” (Steinthal 1865:297).
8
Like Steinthal (1865) (cf. fn. 7), Meillet (1931) was critical of Slavonic, on account of the
introduction of distinctions based on animacy, as opposed to the loss or reduction of the
category in “advanced” languages such as English and Romance. In contrast, this development
was interpreted by Hjelmslev (1956) as contributing towards greater transparency.
 ON GRAMMATICAL GENDER 29

illustrated unhesitatingly with Algonquian and Indo-European. 9 In his

distrustful stance towards regularity in gender assignment, as well as the
methodology of non-formal explanations generally, Bloomfield’s account can
be contrasted with those of Sapir (1884-1939) and Whorf (1897-1941), to
which we will return shortly.
More impressionistically, Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) (1929)
regarded grammatical gender as a historical accident, comparable to a
deformity or a bad habit, and held it responsible for a range of human
afflictions, including nightmares, pathological behaviour, erotic and religious
delusions and sadism. Further, he associated the presence of the category in
Indo-European and Semitic with the cruelty and acts of savagery committed by
the speakers of these languages. Consequently, as it also contributes towards
literary and scientific creativity, gender emerges as friend and foe, blessing and
curse.
Semantic, social and psychological factors were explicitly rejected by
Fodor (1920- ) (1959) and Ibrahim (d. 1994) (1973). Fodor contrasted gender
with other grammatical categories, describing it as superfluous and having no
relation to conceptual categories. 10 If we follow these arguments and reject
social and psychological correlates, then grammatical gender may well appear
to be “an accident of linguistic history” (Ibrahim 1973:50). Following Fodor,
Ibrahim asserted a formal nature of gender, reduced to a “semantically...empty
category” (1973:53), and, in a like manner, contrasted earlier theories of
gender based on personification with modern empirical ones, where linguistic
structure is described as shaping – rather than being shaped by – thought
(1973:15ff.).
As regards the diachrony of gender, several studies suggested that a
semantic classification was only a secondary development in the origin of
Indo-European gender, to be triggered originally by a formal change. An initial
phonological change, as suggested by Lehmann (1916- ) (1958), was to result
in a set of consonantal endings and tripartite congruence, “though without any
reference to sex or natural gender” (Lehmann 1958:196). Similarly,
Kuryłowicz (1964) argued against non-linguistic factors, and related the two
successive splits in the Indo-European gender system to syntactic and
phonological changes. The explanation offered by Fodor (1959) was based on

9
“The gender-categories of most Indo-European languages ... do not agree with anything in the
practical world, and this is true of most such classes. … [t]here seems to be no practical
criterion by which the gender of a noun in German, French, or Latin could be determined”
(Bloomfield 1933:271, 280).
10
“Natural gender, value differentiation and the habits and forms of thinking of the community
speaking the language cannot bring about the category of gender, because the content of
thought cannot be transferred to its external form, the system of language” (Fodor 1959:213).
30 MARCIN KILARSKI

a combination of syntactic, morphological and phonological factors; his

insistence on the semantic arbitrariness of gender has already been mentioned.
These accounts of the nature and origin of gender can be contrasted with
structuralist studies influenced by late 19th and early 20th century sociological,
psychological and anthropological theory. The category of gender was here
treated as a primarily social and psychological phenomenon, its development
resulting from an interplay between structural and extralinguistic factors, as
emphasized by several French and Dutch scholars, e.g., de la Grasserie (1906),
Meillet (1921, 1931), and Royen (1929), and within American anthropology
by, e.g., Sapir (Sapir & Swadesh 1946) and Whorf (1945). Further analogies
were made with religious beliefs (Nieuwenhuis 1935, Wienold 1967), the
matriarchal and nomadic periods in the history of the Indo-Europeans (Schmidt
1926, Havers 1960), as well as climatic and geographical correlates
(Nieuwenhuis 1935). Supposed male and female features in the assignment of
inanimates, particularly the active vs. passive distinction, were considered by,
e.g., Martinet (1957) and Meillet (1921). An analogy between gender and the
creation of the world was made by, among others, Baudouin de Courtenay
(1929). Finally, the origin of individual genders was attributed to less tangible
factors such as “magical energy” (Wensinck 1927) and the male sexual drive
(Sperber 1912).
If we now turn to the research on gender over the last three decades or so,
we can see a substantial contribution based not only on previously undescribed
languages but also on languages which have long been at the centre of
attention. This has made it possible to state with more confidence the common
formal and semantic properties of gender systems.
The attitudes that we have traced since antiquity also recur in contemporary
studies, for example as regards the supposed arbitrariness of gender in German
(e.g., Maratsos 1979). 11 Examples used in this context are in line with those
used in earlier accounts, including Mädchen ‘girl’ n. Thus Allan (1977:290-
291) emphasizes the role of the derivational suffix -chen over the
characteristics of a referent, while Braunmüller (2000:44) uses the noun to
demonstrate that “only grammatical rules operate in languages with a three-
gender system [where the] use of gender is thus restricted to the morphological
and syntactic level”. 12

11
“The classification is arbitrary. No underlying rationale can be guessed at [...] The presence
of such systems in a human cognitive system constitutes by itself excellent testimony to the
occasional nonsensibleness of the species. Not only was this system devised by humans, but
generation after generation of children peaceably relearns it” (Maratsos 1979:232).
12
This is however a double-edged sword, since in such hybrid nouns the competition between
semantic and formal rules may be resolved in favour of semantics, depending among others on
the distance between the controller noun and target forms (see Corbett 1991: Chp. 8).
 ON GRAMMATICAL GENDER 31

In view of the supposed obscure function of natural gender other than in 3rd
person sg., and grammatical gender in languages with a small number of
genders, Trudgill (1999) refers to these phenomena as afunctional historical
baggage, or “linguistic male nipples”. Considering the increase in language
contact in the modern world, Trudgill (1999:149) claims that it is “not unlikely
that languages with large numbers of afunctional grammatical devices will
become less numerous, and indeed it is not entirely impossible that linguistic
gender, except perhaps for natural gender in the third person, will one day
disappear from the languages of the world, never to return.”
As the most grammaticalized type of nominal classification, gender
inevitably has a weaker correlation with semantic properties than noun classes
and classifiers. In consequence, it has been described in this context as
“semantically empty” (Allan 1977:290-291) or arbitrary beyond the sex
distinction, e.g., by Grinevald (2004) 13 and Moravcsik (1978). 14 Comparable
claims with respect to semantic content have also been made about the other
types. 15
In contrast, the insistence on semantic or referential motivation underlies
the arguments for a common semantic basis in all gender languages, as
suggested by Greenberg (1966), Aksenov (1984) and Corbett (1991), as well as
for the presence of assignment rules in individual languages, e.g., by Köpcke
& Zubin (1984) on German, 16 and Tucker, Lambert & Rigault (1977) on
French. The common semantic principles and organization of nominal
classification types have been explored within the UNITYP project (e.g., Seiler
& Lehmann 1982), and in the more recent contributions in Aikhenvald (2000),
Senft (2000) and Unterbeck & Rissanen (2000).
These descriptive and typological studies suggest that formally based
approaches to gender are largely inadequate. In the first place, they ignore the
presence of a semantic basis, which is reflected in the primary properties of
animacy and sex, as well as such secondary criteria as physical properties and
countability. Further, the rejection of cognitive motivation and the insistence
on an incidental nature of gender disallows the possibility of a more universal

13
“Gender systems … have either two or three classes … to which most nouns are assigned
arbitrarily, beyond the recognition of sex differences for animate nouns” (Grinevald
2004:1019).
14
“Gender thus includes distinctions related to animacy, humanness, sex, or any other
qualitative property of nominal referents, as well as distinctions that are not correlated with
any such semantic property – such as the masculine-feminine-neuter distinction in GERMAN
or other INDOEUROPEAN languages or the semantically equally non-interpretable
distinctions on which noun classification in BANTU languages is based” (Moravcsik
1978:336).
15
See, e.g., Richardson (1967:373) on noun classes, and Lehman (1979:165) on classifiers.
16
It is suggestive that Zubin & Köpcke (1986) base their analysis of taxonomies in the German
lexicon on Grimm’s (1890) account of m., f. and n. genders.
32 MARCIN KILARSKI

study of gender in relation to cognitive categories, and belies the possibility of

the development of gender essentially in any language. In addition, the
observed correlates with social parameters suggest that gender is “probably the
only grammatical category which directly reflects...social phenomena and
shifts” (Aikhenvald 2000:347). Likewise, metaphorical extensions of animate
genders to inanimates point towards correlations with cultural parameters.17
Finally, as regards the function of gender, evidence against its non-functional
character is provided by semantic roles, e.g., in the organization of lexicon, and
discourse functions, e.g., in reference tracking (for an overview see
Aikhenvald 2000: Chp. 12).
Despite the different cultural and philosophical background, the treatments
of gender in different periods of linguistic thought show remarkable
similarities. One feels tempted to think of how the motifs we have considered,
i.e. semantic arbitrariness, and formal and non-functional character of gender,
will resurface in future accounts of the category, with new data made available,
but also in the face of the impending loss of so many endangered languages.
It has been repeatedly stressed that it is important to study gender and the
other nominal classification systems, as they “offer a ‘unique window’ into
studying how humans construct representations of the world and encode them
into their languages” (Aikhenvald 2000:307). I hope to have shown that in turn
they offer a unique window into studying how humans construct
representations of linguistic structure and encode them into their grammars.

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