Gender Substantive Essay

A topic of much debate in the current society, gender can also be found to be debatable in a much narrower field of observation, one that, at first glance, does not have anything to do with the actual subject. In fact, gender in the grammatical field seems to be as nebulous as gender in society, there is no unanimous consensus as to what stand for gender. The present report will focus on gender in the substantive and how grammarians define it. In particular, Quirk et al.’s grammar and Huddleston and Pullum’s will be look at in order to draw the portrait of what makes gender in the substantive. Nevertheless, by looking into problems that may be found in both grammars, the report will show that the construction of gender is not set in stone, but it

They distinguish the English language from others by its lack of gender inflections in nous, determiners, and adjectives. In fact, gender can only be seen through 3rd person pronouns and wh-pronouns. In nouns of the English language, gender is said to be ‘notional’ or ‘covert’, opposed to ‘grammatical’ or ‘overt’ in other languages. Nouns are classified with regards to their coreferential link with wh-pronouns. They write that they use male and female to define the gender of nouns. In the section on personal male/female nouns, they write that “personal male nouns have pronoun coreference with who-he while female nouns with who-she” (315). They explain that there are two types of nouns. First, morphologically unmarked for genre, which means that the masculine and feminine are represented by two different words, and secondly, morphologically marked for genre. That is, the gender is created by a derivational suffix. Some words serve as dual gender terms, denoting a male or a female referent. The next section treats of personal dual gender