We remarked in the last chapter that there were difficulties when the morphemic model was applied to English. What are the difficulties and how do we respond to them?

Let us return once more to two of the examples introduced in chapter 1. In

men is Plural. Syntactically, a proportion such as

is exact. But where seas and other regular Plurals have the ending -s, men has no ending. The distinction between man and men is marked differently, by a vowel change. Where then is the allomorph of the Plural morpheme? If seas is grammatically sea + Plural, how can men be man + Plural?

We can now return to inflectional morphology. As we noted in chapter 1, there are alternative models, and in practice different types of language tend to be described differently.

The simplest model is one based on the morpheme. In a line from Yeats which we cited:

both sailed and seas were divided into two units. The first identifies the lexeme, and can be called a lexical morpheme. Following the convention for lexemes established in chapter 2, we can refer to these, in small capitals, as the morphemes sail and sea. The second unit is an inflectional morpheme. In sailed the ending -ed marks Past Participle; let us therefore say, more precisely, that it represents a morpheme ‘Past Participle’. In seas the ending is a Plural marker, and we will accordingly say that it represents the morpheme ‘Plural’. In each word the morphemes form a sequence.

We have argued that the ‘Item and Process’ model is better, for a language like English, than the ‘Item and Arrangement’ model. But our account of it is not complete.

Take, for example, the Past Participle formations. We have dealt with the [d] of sailed and distinguished it from sundry irregularities. But what of [t] in fished or [id] in faded? [t], [d] and [id] all have an alveolar plosive, and the choice between them, as we pointed out in chapter 6, is phonologically conditioned. All three are regular. When the Verb blitz was created or borrowed in the 1940s, its Past Tense and Past Participle were automatically [blitst].

The first edition took me one year flat; the second has taken, off and on, four. I can only hope that, if it shows, it shows in the right way.

I am grateful to Frank Palmer, who commented on the typescript for me, and to my wife, Lucienne Schleich, to whom I have read aloud most of it. I am also grateful to Claudia Ventura for lending me a typewriter while I was on holiday.

One of the oldest findings about language is that the forms of lexical elements generally do not bear a natural relation to their meanings. As Hermogenes put it in a dialogue by Plato, the names of things are justified by nothing more than rule and custom. In particular, words with similar meanings have arbitrarily different forms. Not only is English horse different from French cheval or German Pferd; it also bears no resemblance to semantically related forms like mare, or foal, or cow, and so on.

This was first conceived as a partial editio minor of my recent Inflectional Morphology (in the Cambridge Studies in Linguistics). But it has become, I think, a little more interesting. I hope that it will be of value to specialists in particular European languages, as well as to postgraduate and undergraduate students of general linguistics.

I am very grateful to my colleagues R. W. P. Brasington, D. Crystal, G. C. Lepschy, F. R. Palmer, K. M. Petyt and Irene P. Warburton, who read the book in typescript and have helped me to make a number of corrections and improvements. I look forward with pleasure to a fresh collaboration with the University Printers, who set my first book so beautifully.

What we have called word-formation is usually called ‘derivational morphology’. The formation of election or generation is thus a derivational formation, by which nouns are derived from verbs. By the same token, -ion is a derivational formative or derivational morpheme. I have avoided this terminology for two reasons. Firstly, there are lexical relations in which it is not obvious that one word is derived from the other. Let us return, for example, to the oppositions in Italian between zio ‘uncle’ and ZIA ‘aunt’ or cugina ‘male cousin’ and cugina ‘female cousin’. They too belong to lexical morphology, for the reasons which we have explored in chapter 3. But there is no strong reason for saying either that the Feminines zia and cugina are derived from the Masculines, or vice versa.

Up to this point we have assumed that nouns can be divided into genders and we have analysed the composition of these genders, considering whether they are based solely on semantic criteria, or whether formal factors also have a role. We now turn to gender agreement. This is important for two reasons: first, it is the way in which gender is realized in language use; and second, as a consequence, gender agreement provides the basis for defining gender and for establishing the number of genders in a given language. In this chapter we concentrate on the variety of ways in which gender is exemplified in the languages of the world, leaving to chapter 6 the procedures for determining the number of genders in a given language. While there is a broad consensus on the core cases of agreement, there is no generally accepted definition; there is a problem as to the outer limit of phenomena properly described as agreement, as we shall see when the personal pronoun is discussed in section 5.1. A working definition is provided by Steele (1978: 610):

In this concluding chapter we draw out and develop some general themes which have emerged in our study of gender; we will also take a look backwards at earlier work and forwards to what may be achieved by future research. The notions of meaning and form provide an entry point for reviewing parts of our study and some previous research (section 10.1). The review of earlier work leads us to a discussion of the development and loss of gender systems (section 10.2). Finally, we look at the prospects in this area, both for understanding major questions of the function of gender and for feasible shorter-term projects (section 10.3).

Meaning and form

The relationship between meaning and form is central to linguistics and, not surprisingly, the theme runs through our investigation of gender (section 10.1.1), and through earlier work on the subject (section 10.1.2).

A perspective on gender systems

We saw in chapter 6 how establishing the existence of a gender system and determining the number of genders requires evidence from agreement (that is, evidence concerned with form). At the same time, gender always has a semantic core: there are no gender systems in which the genders are purely formal categories. As shown in chapters 2 and 3, nouns are assigned to gender according to semantic and formal criteria. At one end of the range we find languages like Tamil, in which the meaning of a noun is sufficient to assign it to a gender.

Gender resolution is an area in which the data are often surprising and interesting, yet the topic is frequently left out of account. The term ‘resolution rule’ is taken from Givón (1970), and it refers to a rule which specifies the form of an agreeing element (or target) when the controller consists of conjoined noun phrases. If we have a sentence like Mary and John are happy, it is the number resolution rule which specifies the use of the plural are, rather than is. If we translate this sentence into a language like French, where predicative adjectives agree in gender, we need a gender resolution rule to establish the gender of the adjective, since one conjunct is feminine and the other is masculine. We shall also meet more complex cases: in Slovene, if a neuter singular and a feminine singular are conjoined, it is the gender and number resolution rules which specify the form of the target, say the verbal predicate, as masculine dual. This example, like the English one, illustrates the point that resolution rules do not operate only to resolve feature clashes but can also operate when conjuncts share features (singular in this example). It also suggests that this topic draws together problems connected with controller genders and target genders. While gender resolution will be our main concern, we should see it in the wider context of feature resolution (section 9.1).