4.The impact of Gender policy on functioning of modern English

THE IMPACT OF GENDER POLICY ON THE TARGET CULTURE ADJUSTMENT OF THE JUINIORS

Gender-neutral language, gender-free, bias-free, gender-inclusive language, gender-fair is language use that aims at minimizing assumptions regarding the gender, or biological sex of human referents. As you have witnessed there are many synonyms but we will use the term ‘gender-neutral language’ as the most widespread one.

Gender-neutral language is widely prescribed by certain types of business and educational institutions. The intention is typically a social or ethical one. Gender-neutral language has gained support from major text-book publishers, and from professional and academic groups, newspapers like ‘New York Times’ and the ‘Wall Street Journal’. Many law journals, psychology journals, literature journals do not print articles or papers that use gender bias (gender-inclusive) language.

Recent employee policy manuals have begun to include strongly worded statements prescribing avoidance of language that potentially could be considered discriminatory. The wording of this statement from a policy manual is typical: “All documents, publications or presentations … shall be written in gender-neutral and/or gender-exclusive language.”

Employees are told that they need to be aware of their responsibilities to avoid discriminatory language.

Some of the most interesting changes that have taken place in the English language over the last 30 years have been driven by two desires to unzip the disputed issue of gender as the grammatical category of the English noun in present day English and to avoid, if not to banish, sexism in the language.

In many text-books for both native and non-native speakers of English it is barely mentioned, if at all. (Katie Wales 1996) Katie Wales expresses the idea, everyone, be they amateurs or linguists, native or non-native speakers, would agree with, without a second thought-gender is an, at most, Marginal Category of M.E.

Equating the existence of gender with the existence of gender-specific pronouns poses a problem. We enter a circle of argument and counter-argument if we claim that English has gender because it has pronouns that show gender distinctions – the traditional argumentation would go the opposite way and claim that the distinctions in the pronominal systems only exist because the nominal referent carries the feature “gender”, which in turn has to be mirrored in the pronominal system(s).

The gender system of Quirk is illustrated in the following table.

The patterns of pronoun coreference for singular nouns give us a set of nine gender classes as illustrated in the table below.

Gender Classes in Modern English
		Gender class	Examples	RP	P.P.
Animate	personal	(a) male	Brother, boy	Who	He
		(b) female	Sister, girl	Who	She
		(c) dual	Doctor, teacher	Who	He/she
	generic	(d) common	Baby	Who Which	He/she/it It
		(e) collective	Family	Which Who	It They
	impersonal	(f) higher male animal (g) higher female animal	Bull Cow	Which (Who) Which (Who)	He/it He She/ it She
		(h) lower animal	Ant, Beatle	Which	It, he/she
Inanimate		(i) inanimate	Box, table	Which	It

A more contemporary approach to gender in English can be found in Longman’s Grammar of Spoken and Written English, (Biber, 1999) incorporating, as the title suggests, considerable amounts of material from spoken language for the first time and thus completing rather than substituting Quirk (1985). Biber states that “Gender is a less important category in English than in many other languages”. It is closely tied to the sex of the referent and chiefly reflected in co-occurrence patterns with respect to singular personal pronouns.

Biber’s main gender classification

	Example noun	pronoun
Personal / human
Masculine	Tom, a boy, a man	He
Feminine	Sue, a girl, the woman	She
Dual	A journalist, doctor, teacher	He/she
Non-personal / neuter	A house, a bird	It

The system presented here seems much closer to reality than the one proposed by Quirk. Biber and his colleagues are well aware of the fact that gender is a problematic category in Modern English.

The most recent effort in the field, Huddleston and Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English language (2002) by way f quoting the following “It is important to distinguish carefully between the grammatical terms” ‘masculine and feminine and the semantic or extra linguistic terms ‘male’ and ‘female’”. Until relatively recently it was usual to make a parallel distinction between gender (grammatical) and sex (extra linguistic).

English does show agreement, though in a very restricted sense – English has gender; though it is not an inflectional category and not as strongly grammatiaclized as in other languages. Though some of the assumptions of Pullum and Huddleston take a very clear position in assessing the category, which is refreshing and helpful compared with the earlier descriptions. Typical wording can be found in the actual distributional properties of masculine ‘he’, feminine ‘she’ and neuter ‘it’. He and she referring to males and females respectively. ‘It’ referring to ‘entities which are neither male or female’ are identified as the ‘core uses’ of ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’.

5. The inherent and configurational categoriescof the Verb.Problems of parsing the English verb.New approachesto the tence and aspect categories .Mood and modality.

Morphosyntactic properties of nouns fall into two groups: distributional(configurational) and structural properities.Distributional properties have to do with how words are distributed in phrases, clauses,or in texts.For ex:verbs can serve as heads of verb phrases,predicates of clauses,and they code events ina text.Structural properties have to do with the internal structure of the verb itself.For ex: verbs exhibit subject agreement,tence –aspect-mode marking etc,wheras forms that belong to other grammatical categories do not.

In English the verb shows greater morphological complexity than any other word class.

Verb (V) a word used to describe an event of situation, or a word belonging to lexical class that includes such words as canonical members: the head of VP. E.g. run, kiss, have will

The function characteristically performed by verbs is that of Predicator and the structures characteristically built around them are clauses. “Almost all verbs make inflected forms by adding –s, -es in the 3-rd person. Sing. And by adding –ing Gerund and every word which inflects in these ways is a verb” (Ralph Long (1961) A Grammar of Contemporary English.

The Inherent Verbal Properties are the categories of Tense, Aspect, Mood and Voice.

These categories all add further specification to the event, state, process or action.

Normally, Tense indicates the time of the predication in relation to some particular moment. This moment is typically the moment of speaking or writing. Tense indicates whether the event happened prior to the moment of speaking or writing (past tense) is contemporaneous with it (present tense) or subsequent to it (future tense). Tripartite [‘trai’pa:tαit] tense distinctions are by no means universal.

In some systems only a two-way distinction is made (Read Otto Jespersen and Barhudarov. L.S.)

Aspect is another common inherent verbal category. Its function is to highlight the internal temporal unholding of the predication. Essentially, aspect indicates whether an event, state, process or action that is denoted by a verb is completed or in progress.

“The aspect used for incomplete actions is called imperfective (or progressive) aspect and that used to indicate completed actions is called perfective aspect.” (Comrie 1976, Lyons 1977).

Mood is also an inherent Verbal Category. Its function is to describe an event in terms of whether it is necessary, possible, permissive, desirable and the like (Palmer, 2001).

The semantic concepts expressed in the following examples are typical

You must go (necessity)

You can go (possibility)

You may go (Permission)

You ought to go (Desirability)

The basis of the discussion in the body of the lecture is that ‘Tense’ is grammaticalised expression of Location in time. The difference between ‘John sang and John sings’ in English is one of tense, whereas that between ‘John sings and John is singing’ is not tense, but matter of Aspect.

The term absolute tense is a traditional term, that has come to be used to refer to tenses which take the present moment as their deictic center.

Representation of situations on the time-line

Present Tense (according to Bernard Comrie)

A B C D G H

F1

E F I

Our interest will be to relate various events, processes, states to the time line represented above. In Figure 1. Situation “A” procedes situation “B”. “B” proceeds “C” while “C” follows “B.” Situation “D” and “E” overlap as do “G” and “F” and also H and I although the natures of overlap are somewhat different.

Mood and Modality

The Basic concepts: Realis and irrealis.

The notion of “assertion” and “non-assertion”. Modality is concerned with the status of the proposition that describes the event. Basic concepts of mood and modality are “Realis” and “Irrealis” (the terms are introduced by Bernard Comrie in his book “Aspect” C.U.P. digital reprint 2001.Bernard Comrie, born 1947)

The distinction is that “The realis” portrays situations as actualized, as having occurred or actually occurring, knowable through direct perception. “The irrealis” portrays situations as purely within the realm [relm] of thought, knowable only through imagination. Traditionalists distinguish the following mood systems.

1. The indicative (unmarked)

2. The subjunctive, which is mainly found in subordinate clauses

3. Imperative

But Lukoff (1968, 172 ff) recognises six different uses of the Subjunctive in the Main clauses:

(for detailed discussion, address the power point of the Lecture 6).

Cambridge Linguistic School distinguishes the following Imperative Mood

The Imperative Mood

Jussive

Lyons (1977, 747) argues that the Imperative can only be, strictly, second person, and never third person or first person. When the order, command, is addressed to the 2-nd and 3-d persons then it is Jussive.

Bybee (1985, 171) holds the same idea.

Directives

That emanates from someone in authority, which therefore, does not expect non-compliance e.g.

Teacher Student.

4. The category of tense

The category of tense is a verbal

category that reflects the objective category of time. The essential characteristic of the category of tense is that it relates the time of the action, event or state of affairs referred to in the sentence to the time of the utterance (the time of the utterance being 'now ' or the present moment). The tense category is realized through the oppositions. The binary principle of oppositions remains the basic one in the correlation of the forms that represent the grammatical category of tense. The present moment is the main temporal plane of verbal actions. Therefore, the temporal dichotomy may be illustrated by the following graphic representation (the arrows show the binary opposition):