| Abstract | This paper is mainly concerned with the grammatical category of gender in the English language. More particularly, it explores gender markers and gender marking along with personal dual gender nouns. It starts with the theoretical analysis of the phenomenon, in which we define gender as a grammatical category of nouns with a three-way distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter, based on the properties of the noun and its referents. We then continue with examining personal masculine nouns and personal feminine nouns, which can be either morphologically unmarked between male and female (mother and father), or the two gender forms can have a derivational relationship (bride and bridegroom). In the next part, we focus on personal dual gender nouns, a class that includes a fairly large number of nouns which are neutral for gender, or in other words, may stand for referents of both sexes (doctor, artist, lawyer). We finish the theoretical part with a section about sexual bias in the English language and explore the tendency of the language to reflect societal differences in the typical roles of men and women. Our corpus study analyses a few personal dual gender nouns chosen from those presented in the results of the corpus studies reported in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English by Biber et al (1999). We start with analysing a few gender-neutral nouns that end with person(s)/-people (chairperson, spokesperson), continue with unmarked gender-neutral nouns (doctor, artist), and finish with the uniquely feminine terms (charwoman, needlewoman). |
