Tom Wier wrote:
>> >> I've even read a (a really old) book that suggested that English has
SEVEN
>> >> genders. In addition to your four, he separated the inanimate uses of
>> >> "she" (like a car or boat) and "he" (don't remember his examples, and I
>> >> usually don't use he of inanimates), and the use of "it" with babies and
>> >> sometimes young children. A bit excessive in my opinion.
>> >
>> >Could he come up with good syntactic reasons for doing that? I can't
>> >imagine that he could legitimize that based on morphology.
>>
>> Nope. No justification for what he said at all. He wasn't even being
adamant
>> that it was truly the case, just suggesting the possibility since it was
just
>> as realistic (to him) as claiming English had three based on the pronouns.
>
>Well, then he didn't really understand what a linguistic "gender" means.
>Gender means, like Nik said, that their is some sort of lexical
categorization
>going on whereby the speakers treat the classes differently. But it's more
than
>just that: the genders are a *result* of, not a precondition for, the
syntactic
>and morphological patterns found in the language. We can only say that a
>gender exists if there is a grammatical reason to say they exist. The
examples
>you cited show not the existence of separate grammatical categories, but of
>individual lexical items being *subcategorized* into those lexical
categories.
>The author you speak of seems to be confusing various optional
subcategorizations,
>and even metaphorical categorizations, which by definition break all the
rules,
>with the categories themselves.
I completely agree with you. I wasn't too impressed by the book at all. It
was one of those "Introduction to Language"-type books back from the early
part
of last century. (I originally wrote "this century", but realized that could
be construed as sometime within the last three months. :-) ). Views of
language have changed a lot in linguistic circles since then.
Marcus