Open AccessCzym jest i dokąd sięga rodzaj (nie)naturalny?
Author(s) -
Piotr Wojdak
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
slavia occidentalis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2544-9222
pISSN - 0081-0002
DOI - 10.14746/so.2016.73.11
Subject(s) - noun , grammatical gender , natural (archaeology) , meaning (existential) , linguistics , natural kind , psychology , feature (linguistics) , proper noun , semantics (computer science) , computer science , identity (music) , philosophy , geography , archaeology , psychotherapist , programming language , aesthetics
The article presents considerations concerning the essence and the scope of the concept of the natural gender of nouns. The author advocates its grammatical categorisation – instead of the semantic categorisation dominating in the literature. This means that the superior category in natural gender should be grammatical gender (hence the proposed compound term: natural grammatical gender), and not a semantic feature. In a simple (prototypical) categorisation, natural gender pertains to masculine nouns with male meaning and feminine nouns with female meaning. The article identifies five types of possible extension of this concept:1. the isolation of the neuter natural gender;2. the attribution of natural gender to nouns with inconsistent semantics of sex;3. the recognition of the natural gender which is incompatible with grammatical gender (this extension is onlypossible when natural gender is treated as a semantic feature);4. the analysis of all nouns that denote sexual beings with regard to natural gender;5. the isolation of subcategories of natural masculine nouns (natural genders of the second degree).Complimentary to the narrow understanding of natural gender, the author proposes to use an antonymous term – “unnatural gender” to designate such kind of grammatical gender of personal (or animate) nouns that is not in compliance with their semantic feature of sex (e.g., CHŁOPISKO [A CHAP], BABSZTYL [A HAG]).