LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 23:5 May 2023
ISSN 1930-2940

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Grammatical Gender: An Overview of Gender Assignment in Garhwali

Saket Bahuguna


Abstract

This paper examines the grammatical gender assignment system in Garhwali using both phonological and semantic principles. In the semantic assignment rules of the language, it is determined that the nouns for sex-differentiable male humans, male animals, and male deities in Garhwali are masculine, while the nouns for sex-differentiable female humans, female animals, and female deities are feminine. The assignment of all the nouns in the language cannot be explained by these semantic assignment rules alone and results in a large residue of nouns which are analyzed through the phonological assignment rules. According to this study’s findings, most nouns ending in front unrounded vowels in Garhwali are feminine except those ending in /i/. In contrast, the majority of those ending in back rounded vowels and the back unrounded vowel /a/ are masculine.

Keywords: Grammatical Gender, Gender Assignment, Indo-Aryan, Central Pahari, Garhwali

Introduction

According to Hockett (1958:231), grammatical gender is defined as classes of nouns that are mirrored in the behaviour of related words. As stated by Corbett (1991: 1), this categorization of grammatical gender often, though not always, correlates to a real-world sex distinction, at least in part. According to Kramer (2020: 46), grammatical gender is the categorization of nouns into two or more classes based on criteria such as animacy, humanness, social gender for people, and/or biological sex for animals, or both, for at least some animate noun and reflected by agreement patterns on other elements. Therefore, agreement is a crucial concept in grammatical gender. The existence of grammatical gender and the number of genders in a language are proven by evidence of agreement, implying that grammatical gender depends on the form. However, grammatical gender has a “semantic core” (Aksenov 1984 cited in Corbett 1991) and is not solely dependent on form. As a result, even though their precise functions vary from language to language, we may argue that gender is concerned with both form and meaning. Grammatical gender can be determined in certain languages solely by meaning, whereas in others, it can be determined by a combination of both meaning and form.

Gender Assignment

How do native speakers of a language determine the grammatical gender of hundreds of Nouns? Both linguists and non-linguists have always considered this subject to be intriguing. Corbett (1991: 7) states that native speakers are able to systematically assign nouns a grammatical gender. He offers three justifications for this. First, it is acceptable to presume that native speakers do not remember the nouns individually since else they would make more mistakes in gender usage. Second, words that have been acquired from other languages take on gender, demonstrating that gender may be assigned and not only remembered. Third, speakers assign invented words gender and do so with a high degree of precision. Native speakers are, therefore, able to assign grammatical gender to nouns in a systematic way.


This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.


Saket Bahuguna
National Council of Educational Research and Training, New Delhi
saketbahugunadu@gmail.com

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