ԱՆԳԼԵՐԵՆԻ ՍԵՌԻ ՔԵՐԱԿԱՆԱԿԱՆ ԿԱՐԳԸ ՏԱՐԱԺԱՄԱՆԱԿՅԱ ՏԵՍԱՆԿՅՈՒՆԻՑ / THE CATEGORY OF GENDER IN ENGLISH FROM DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The paper aims at studying the diachronic development of both the natural and grammatical gender categories of English. To define the historical development of the given phenomenon it is essential to study different approaches towards the gender category. Moreover, the article deals with the evolution stages of grammatical gender in pre-historic period, in particular, in Pre-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic languages. It is noteworthy that the grammatical gender has not been considered as a grammatical category in many languages, and in some of them it is viewed as a semantic category. Thus, the language that possesses natural gender implies that the gender of a noun or a pronoun referring to an animate objects should correspond to their natural gender, whereas their grammatical gender is “artificial or formal”. All the nouns of a language with a grammatical gender, possess the category of gender, still their being of masculine, feminine or neutral gender is almost impossible to identify merely taking into account the meaning of the noun itself.