When it became all things: A study of the rise of natural gender in English anaphoric pronouns.

Abstract

The shift from grammatical to natural gender in the history of English is often cited as one of the pivotal changes in the language's development, but the exact nature of the transformation has remained understudied. This corpus-based study, extrapolating from evidence in the Old and early Middle English parts of the Helsinki Corpus, provides a detailed picture of the transitional period between gender systems, focusing specifically on the rise of natural gender agreement in the third person anaphoric pronouns. The results of this study show that variation in the gender of these anaphoric pronouns in both Old and early Middle English is highly patterned as this syntactic change diffuses through the early English lexicon and across early English dialects. The statistics from the Old English part of this study reveal that grammatical gender agreement remains fairly healthy in the anaphoric pronouns throughout the Old English period, although the pronouns demonstrate a discernible tendency towards natural gender. The lexical diffusion of the gender shift is affected by both grammatical and discursive factors (e.g., the distance between the anaphoric pronoun and the antecedent noun phrase), as well as lexical field considerations for the antecedent noun. The pivotal period in the transition between gender systems in written texts occurs in the early Middle English period (1150-1250 A.D.), as the balance tips towards the modern gender agreement system. Old English masculine nouns shift significantly earlier than feminine nouns--a result of the grammatical reanalysis of the ambiguous masculine-neuter forms his and him, which simultaneously fall out of usage in reference to inanimate nouns. As the syntactic factor of distance between the anaphoric pronoun and the antecedent noun ceases to be a determinant, clear discourse factors that favor natural gender agreement emerge, a finding that dovetails theories about the loss of grammatical gender within the noun phrase. These details about the progression of the gender shift, which show that this grammatical change adheres to general principles in diachronic syntax, help to refute Middle English creole theories and to explain some of the fluctuation still apparent in Modern English gender, a grammatical phenomenon which has traditionally frustrated linguists' descriptive attempts.