Feminine Nouns Masculine Nouns
A great many person nouns in English are capable of expressing both feminine and masculine person genders by way of the pronominal correlation in question. These are referred to as nouns of the "common gender". Here belong such words as person, parent, friend, cousin, doctor, president, etc.
E.g.: The President of our Medical Society isn't going to be happy about the suggested way of cure. In general she insists on quite another kind of treatment in cases like that.
The capability of expressing both genders makes the gender distinctions in the nouns of the common gender into a variable category. On the other hand, when there is no special need to indicate the sex of the person referents of these nouns, they are used neutrally as masculine, i.e. they correlate with the masculine third person pronoun.
In the plural, all the gender distinctions are neutralized in the immediate explicit expression. Alongside of the grammatical (or lexico-grammatical, for that matter) gender distinctions, English nouns can show the sex of their referents lexically, either by means of being combined with certain notional words used as sex indicators, or else by suffixal derivation.
Cf.: boy-friend, girl-friend; man-producer, woman-producer; washer-man, washer-woman; landlord, landlady; bull-calf, cow-calf; cock-sparrow, hen-sparrow; he-bear, she-bear; master, mistress; actor, actress; executor, executrix; lion, lioness; sultan, sultana; etc.
Thus, the category of gender in English is inherently semantic, i.e. meaningful as it reflects the actual features of the named objects, besides it is represented in the nounal system as a whole.
5. Article Determination
Article is a determining unit of specific nature accompanying the noun in communicative collocations. Its special character is clearly seen in comparison with the words of half-notional semantics such as this, any, some, etc. These determiners interpret the referent of the noun in relation to other objects or phenomena of a like kind, whereas the semantic purpose of the article is to specify the nounal referent in the most general way, without any explicitly expressed contrasts.
Another peculiarity of the article, as different from the determiners in question, is that, in the absence of a determiner, the use of the article with the noun is quite obligatory.
Taking into consideration these peculiar features of the article, it’s importat to determine its status in the system of morphology, namely to decide whether the article is a purely auxiliary element of a special grammatical form of the noun which functions as a component of a definite morphological category, or it is a separate word, i.e. a lexical unit in the determiner word set, of a more abstract meaning than other determiners.
To arrive at a definite decision, the consideration of the properties of the English articles should be made:
semantic evaluation as such,
a situational estimation of their uses,
analysis of their categorial features in the light of the oppositional theory,
a paradigmatic generalization.
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