The analysis of gender markers in animals

Vol.37,No.1(2011)

Ludmila Zemková

https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2011-1-10

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/118128

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Abstract
This paper aims to be a contribution to the study of the linguistic concept of gender. Out of many potential challenges in this area, it will focus on the problem of assigning gender to animal nouns. This problem is topical in view of the fact that in present-day English, gender is a marginal grammatical category and therefore recedes into the background in descriptions of today's English. Grammatical gender is a rare topic of research and scientific discussions or papers. A detailed analysis of gender assignment to animal names is based on two subcorpora (the English edition of National Geographic and the English edition of Journal of Zoology). To make the picture as complete as possible, a contrastive analysis of gender markers is offered.

Keywords:
gender markers; animal nouns; gender distinctions; comparative analysis; subcorpora

Pages:
153–160
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