SEMANTIC FEATURES OF GENDER LEXICAL UNITS OF ENGLISH

Abstract

This article is about semantic features of gender lexical units in modern linguistics. In everyday speech, the word “gender” is associated with the biological and social differences between women and men. In addition, people might know that languages can have masculine and feminine words. It may seem that grammatical gender is a reflection of natural gender in grammar. We know that in everyday language, gender is not talked about, not even mentioned. In other words, it is not the type of information that is predicated of a referent. It is not often uttered such statements as: ‘she’s a woman’ or ‘my computer is a thing’. These sentences are perfectly grammatical of course, and they make sense, but they are not uttered. Or if they are gender nous such as ‘woman’ or ‘man’ are not used to convey information about gender but some implicature, often close to stereotype: ‘She spends a fortune on perfume. – Well, what do you expect, she’s a woman’. In texts we find such utterances as ‘She was an extraordinary woman’ (where the noun is preceded by an adjective) but not ’She was a woman’. In the first of these two clauses the noun ‘woman’ is only there to support the extra specification of the adjective (‘extraordinary’).