This study is about gender in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. A more general problem is of course why languages have gender at all. I do not claim to have the full answer to this question, but let us take a closer look.
Semantic gender reflects basic cognitive categories, such as animacy, malehood, femalehood, mass, and countability (cf. Pinker 2007:81). Concepts of this kind are probably universal, even though not all languages express all of them by specific pronouns or by other pronominal resources, such as inflection. Within a generative framework, basic concepts of this kind can be represented by functional projections, for instance by an Animate Phrase, a Sex Phrase etc. In chapter 4 I introduced the idea of “strong meanings” vs. “weak meanings”; this idea can be connected directly to the notion of semantic gender.
Semantic gender pronouns carry “strong meanings”. The meaning of these pronouns is not negotiable; it stays the same across contexts and over time. The pronoun han ‘he’, for example, has very few meaning components, which could all be rendered in terms of plus values of the basic features MALE, SINGULAR, and DEFINITE. If the plus value of one of these features switches to a minus value, the result is another pronoun, for instance hon ‘she’. Nouns are different. Even though a noun, for example kung ‘king’, includes the component ‘male’ as a salient part of its meaning, it can be used in compounds, such as alke+kung ‘little auk’ (lat. alle alle) or kungs+vatten (litt. king+water) ‘hydrochloric acid’, the meaning of which is completely unrelated to “maleness”. The noun kung ‘king’ can also be used in sentences, such as Hon är kung ‘she is king’, which is not ungrammatical, though maybe a bit awkward. Kung ‘kung’ can also have a (metaphoric) mass meaning, as in Han var inte mycket
till kung (he was not much to king) ‘There wasn’t very much king quality in him’. The
meaning of kung ‘king’ is thus highly flexible.
Turning to formal gender, we know that languages can do well without this category – so why do languages have formal genders? My tentative answer is that formal gender at one point in the language history must have had a meaning corresponding to a semantic gender, or at least that a part of the word stock of nouns had a formal gender related to a semantic gender. The combining of an expression of a semantic gender – with a strong meaning, in the sense above – and a noun with a weaker, flexible meaning, will yield a fixed or at least a more precise meaning of the concept denoted by the noun, much in the way we find for the combination of
a classifier and a noun. For example det fisk (3N fish) in West Jutlandic means ‘fish as a mass
or collective denotation’, whereas fisk in a common gender context has a countable meaning. However, as time goes by, the prototypical or maybe most frequent combination of a noun and the expression of a semantic gender may eventually become a conventionalized combination – akin to an idiom. Once such a conventionalized combination is fixed, a formal gender is established for the noun in question. This formal gender will be associated with the noun, also when the noun undergoes semantic drift or is used in non-typical ways. As time passes, the less transparent will the relation between formal gender and meaning tend to be – which means that formal gender will become obligatory for the sake of phonological wellformedness, but without meaning. (But like phonology in general it might lend itself to to distinguishing meanings.)
To exemplify the process described above, let us go back to West Jutlandic, which had a three-gender system of the Old Norse type, at earlier stages. Around 1000 AD, inflection started to erode, a process that is described in chapter 7. The new system that arose was strictly semantic in nature, and, drawing on Ringgaard (1971:30–31), we may conclude that nouns in this system have no formal gender at all; nouns are assigned a semantic gender – by means of pronominal resources – depending on the intended meaning in the actual speech situation. In other words, this is a system without a formal gender. In chapter 7 this is described as a classifier system.
Demonstratives seem to have played an important role in the development of the West Jutlandic gender system. In chapter 7 I suggested that demonstrative det (3N) is composed by
the components ‘pure indexicality’, ‘entity’, and ‘absence of number’. The use of det as a “gender marker” includes the loss of indexicality. As pointed out above, the meaning of a noun could be described in terms of central or prototypical meanings. For ‘milk’ the prototypical meaning is that of a mass, naturally. The most frequent combination in a language variety, such as in West Jutlandic, is therefore of the type det mælk (N milk) ‘milk’. With time, this association may become conventionalized – this is how a noun acquires a formal gender. And this is what seems to have happened in certain East Jutlandic dialects, where a noun like mælk ‘milk’ has taken neuter as its new formal gender (Arboe 2009:15). Some more East Jutlandic nouns that have undergone a “gender switch” of this kind are
brændevin ‘aquavit’, kaffe ‘coffee’, hør ‘flax’, dyppelse ‘drippings’, talg ‘tallow’, honning
Nouns have a prototypical meaning, but this meaning is not the only possibility. Even ‘milk’ may have different readings, for example a bounded ‘kind’ reading, as in This milk tastes so
much better, because it’s produced from grazing cows, than that milk. So, if the new gender
of a noun like ‘milk’ is semantically motivated, there will be uses that go against this, which, in turn, means that the formal gender is no longer semantically motivated in these particular uses. An example of a potential future scenario would be if lexical drift would give the noun
hør ‘flax’ a new meaning, ‘linen dress’, as its typical meaning. In that case hør ‘flax’ would
still be neuter in East Jutlandic, and constitute a counterexample to the generalization that neuter is the gender of non-countables. In yet other cases, semantic drift might make a noun turn up with an unexpected gender for other reasons. In Swedish, nouns, denoting humans, are normally common gender. However, the noun fruntimmer ‘woman’ is neuter, probably because it once had the meaning ‘group of women’.83 The same line of explanation, a semantic drift that goes form a collective to an individual meaning, seems to explain why sto ‘mare’ is neuter (Hellquist 1948, Åkerblom 2013). Another case is the Swedish noun bud ‘messenger’, which is neuter, probably because it is a metonymic extension of the nominalization bud, with the meaning ‘message’.
Another force at work is our propensity to form paradigms on the basis of similarity in form. I have mentioned the noun pappa ‘daddy’, which was a feminine noun, because it ends in -a in Early Modern Swedish. A strange exception to the rule that nouns denoting large animals are common gender in Swedish is the neuter noun lejon ‘lion’. One possibility that has been suggested is that lejon ‘lion’ is neuter because it patters with other nouns ending in -on, such as lingon ‘lingonberry’, hjortron ‘cloudberry’, and helgon ‘saint’ (Lindström 2007).
A consequence of my proposal is that a system with a fully semantically motivated formal gender runs a risk of not being stable for any longer period of time. Gender in a fully semantically based gender system is per definition assigned in the speech situation and has to be flexible and possible to adapt for different uses of nouns, taking the reference of the noun into consideration, ignoring formal aspects of the noun, such as phonological similarities to other nouns. As soon as a connection between a noun and a certain semantic gender starts to conventionalize, a system of formal gender arises. Since lexemes are polysemous,
83
The fact that fruntimmer is neuter could also be due to the fact that the word is borrowed from German, cf. Frauenzimmer, litt. ‘lady room’, which is neuter, as is the simplex Zimmer ‘room’ (Wessén 1960 [1997]). Interestingly, Zimmer, in turn, is etymologicaly related to Swedish timber and English timber, thus the origin is a typical mass denotation, another semantic source for neuter.
phonological changes and semantic drift are very likely to happen. This, in addition to the strong tendency to form analogies on the basis of form, will make the system opaque, and a strict correlation between formal gender and meaning is no longer at hand.
If language was truly functional, we would expect formal gender to disappear when it is no longer predictable from semantics. However, it seems as though language users are basically conservative, which means that it takes a long time to get rid of elements, such as the expression of formal gender, when the connection to semantics is less clear or gone. I have explained the use of agreement on adjectives in MSc in terms of a phonological wellformedness condition. It is possible that this is just another way of saying that agreement in formal gender is merely ornamental. One could maybe consider the possibility that agreement is functional, and helps the listener to retrieve elements in the discourse. This cannot be excluded of course, but until good evidence is presented, we have reasons to be skeptical to this line of reasoning.
The discussion in this chapter is partly an answer to an objection that Hans-Olav Enger (see Enger 2013) made to the analysis proposed in Josefsson (2009a) (which is basically the same analysis as the one proposed in this study). Enger was worried that we would have to postulate two kinds of neuter if we accept a split between formal and semantic gender – according to him an undesirable and uneconomical analysis. My answer is that empirical evidence show that we need to acknowledge that formal, semantic, and lexical gender constitute three different dimensions. In a synchronic perspective, neuter as a formal gender on nouns does not carry any meaning; there is simply no meaning component common for all neuter nouns. This might have been the case at earlier stages in the language development, but it is no longer so. Within the semantic gender dimension neuter is meaningful, by indicating the absence of meaningful category. In det (3N) and vilket (which.N) ‘which’, neuter indicates
the absence of number, and in något (some.N) ‘something’ and inget (no.N) ‘nothing’, the absence of animacy.
However, there seems to be a close link between lexical, formal, and semantic gender. It is quite possible that formal gender historically is derived from semantic gender. Semantic gender, in turn, relates to lexical gender – to salient meaning components of nouns; for instance, if we talk about a barnmorska ‘midwife’or a drottning ‘queen’, there is a great chance that we use the pronoun hon ‘she’. When a formal gender system breaks down, my guess is that the new system that arises – if such a system arises at all – is based on semantic
genders. And the system stays semantic, until phonological reductions, semantic drift, analogy based on form etc. blur the picture, once again ...
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