Unhistorical Gender Assignment in Laʒamon’s Brut: A Case Study of a Late Stage in the Development of Grammatical Gender toward its Ultimate Loss by Seiji Shinkawa (review)

Seiji Shinkawa’s Unhistorical Gender Assignment in Laʒamon’s Brut sets itself the goal of exploring the system of grammatical gender found in the Brut. This gives an interesting snapshot of one dialect of Middle English during the period immediately prior to the shift from a system of grammatical gender, in which nouns belong to somewhat arbitrary categories governing agreement patterns, to a system of natural gender, in which biological gender or animacy determines patterns of concord. The author investigates deviations from the expected gender assignment of particular nouns, viewing these deviations as part of the sequence of changes taking place that ultimately result in the loss of grammatical gender. Ultimately, he argues that the process involved less a deterioration of the inflectional nominal system marking gender and more a repurposing of morphological material to express other distinctions, in particular a newly-developed distinction between the article the and the demonstrative that.

The book opens with an overview of the system of gender marking found in Old English, followed by a very brief discussion of the traditional explanation for the loss of gender marking: the decay of inflectional endings made it impossible to maintain a system of grammatical gender. Shinkawa rightly points out several flaws in this analysis, including the fact that demonstratives and personal pronouns for the most part would have been capable of maintaining gender distinctions; the demonstratives the and that, in fact, were retained in the language and so might have been capable of preserving a distinction between neuter and non-neuter had they not been repurposed by language users. The next chapter, two, comprises the majority of the book. The author organizes the chapter around the various forms of the demonstratives and adjectives; for each form, he tabulates its occurrence with nouns of each gender in each of the two manuscripts of the Brut. For example, the author notes that þeo, which may be a variant of the masculine nominative singular demonstrative þe but which may also be an analogically-created variant of the older feminine nominative singular demonstrative sēo, occurs with the nouns shāthe ‘monster’ and wŏmman ‘woman,’ raising the possibility that wŏmman has changed its gender from masculine to feminine (p. 30). The author is very thorough and methodical in his discussion; one could wish, however, that he had made some effort in this chapter to relate the mass of philological detail to the overall structure of his argument. In chapter three the author briefly develops his explanation for many of the deviations in gender assignment seen in Brut: certain suffixes which had originally marked case, number, and gender, came to be used primarily to mark case. In particular, -es came to be used to mark genitive, -Vn (that is, one of a variety of vowels plus n) and -re marked datives and objects of prepositions, and -ne marked accusatives, regardless of gender. The analogical spread of these suffixes then allowed for the reanalysis of the gender of a number of nouns. A similar situation in Old English involving the spread of these case suffixes in the Lindisfarne Gospels and in the Durham Ritual was discussed by Charles Jones in ‘The functional motivation of linguistic change,’ English Studies 48 (1967): 1–6, 97–111; it is surprising that Shinkawa does not explicitly connect his similar findings concerning the same set of suffixes to the earlier research, since doing so would make it clear that the process must have been ongoing over a significant period of time.

Chapter four focuses on another change in progress: the reanalysis of the distinction between masculine nominative singular the and neuter nominative singular that as...