Gender shifts in the history of English (review)

Anne Curzan begins her monograph by telling how she was voted the ‘Word of the millennium’ at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in 2000. This piece of recent history is a fitting introduction to her book highlighting the role of anaphoric personal pronouns in the fundamental change that English underwent from grammatical to natural gender in the course of the last millennium. C takes a broad view of gender in chronological and linguistic terms, including the topic of language and gender in public debates in the English-speaking world over the last few decades. This concern for current relevance makes the book informative not only for language professionals but also for the general reader interested in language.

Starting from the present, C places issues such as the generic use of the masculine pronoun he in the bigger picture of linguistic gender in the history of English. She does this by approaching the topic from three interrelated angles: (i) the development of personal pronoun reference to animate beings, (ii) the loss of grammatical gender and the concomitant rise of natural gender in personal pronouns referring to inanimate objects, and (iii) the semantic shifts in the lexical fields of words that clearly retain gender in a natural gender system, that is, the words for ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘girl’, and ‘boy’ (6).

Ch. 1 introduces the theoretical terms in which the shift from Old English grammatical gender to natural gender in Middle English and its manifestations today can be accounted for. C’s approach crosses disciplinary boundaries by including social and cultural considerations besides linguistic ones. Charles Hockett’s definition (cited in Corbett 1991:1) provides the umbrella term for linguistic gender ‘as a system of noun classification reflected in associated words’. This definition covers both semantic and grammatical gender, based on whether the semantics of a noun defines its gender (semantic or natural gender) or not (grammatical gender).

C’s study focuses on the loss of grammatical gender as it is reflected in personal pronoun anaphora, that is, outside the noun phrase rather than inside it, in patterns of agreement between nouns and their determiners and modifiers. This perspective is informed by the agreement hierarchy proposed by Corbett (1991), which provides a principled tool for tracing the erosion of grammatical gender (19). Moving from left to right, the hierarchy marks an increasing likelihood of semantic gender agreement in a language. At all times third-person personal pronouns stand out as the category most likely to show semantic rather than grammatical agreement with their antecedents.

(1) attributive < predicate < relative pronoun < personal pronoun

The modern natural gender system in English can thus be viewed as the endpoint of a crosslinguistically attested diachronic development, not a historical anomaly. But this scalar framework can entail problems for the traditional view that gender is a fixed property of the word. The issue is connected with the fact that gender is a covert category even in languages with natural gender such as Modern English and that ‘the English people are consistently inconsistent in their choice of gendered pronouns according to strict natural gender rules’ (20). Inconsistency particularly occurs in gender assignment to inanimate nouns. C therefore advocates a more dynamic view of gender as a cultural construct to account for both synchronic variation and historical changes.

Ch. 2 shows that coming to grips with the notion of gender has not always been easy in histories of English. C’s discussion here as elsewhere is balanced and comprehensive, painting a broad picture of the history of the discipline from prescientific accounts to standard reference works and more specific treatments, including the controversy over Middle English being a creole (a view C rejects). Tracing back earlier uses of the term ‘gender shift’, one could add Poussa (1992:408), who launched the term ‘Great gender shift’ in her study of the demonstratives this and that.

How can a historical linguist then document this shift from grammatical to...