Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2022, Page 51

Lykilorð: málfræðilegt kyn, merkingarlegt kyn, vísandi kyn, samræmiskyn, samræmi,
samræmisstigveldi, sjálfgefið (ómarkað) málfræðilegt kyn, íslenska, færeyska, málstöðlun
Keywords: gender agreement, grammatical gender, semantic gender, referential gender,
agreement hierarchy, default grammatical gender, Icelandic, Faroese, language standardiza-
tion, language reform

summary
‘Three genders’
Icelandic has a rich gender system. Nouns come in three genders (masculine, feminine,
neuter) and adjectives, various pronouns and the numerals 1–4 inflect for gender.
Attributive gender-inflected words always agree in gender with the nouns that they mod-
ify. Predicative adjectives typically show gender agreement with the relevant nominative
subject, and pronouns often agree in gender with nouns that they refer to. In some
instances, however, the gender of predicative adjectives and, more frequently, pronouns is
not determined by any particular noun in the text but by something outside the language
which is being referred to. It has been pointed out in the literature that such exceptions to
grammatical agreement follow the well-known agreement hiearchy proposed by Corbett
(1979) in that they do not occur at all in the case of attributive modifiers and they are less
common in the case of predicatives than pronouns. It is argued in the paper, however, that
the traditional distinction between “grammatical gender” (or “grammatical agreement”)
and “semantic gender” (or “semantic agreement”) is insufficient when one tries to explain
the distribution and meaning of gender-inflected forms. This distribution can be better
accounted for in terms of the three “genders” (or gender-types, rather) “agreement gen-
der”, “referential gender” and “default grammatical gender”. The bulk of the discussion
then centers around the choice between agreement gender and referential gender on the
one hand (section 3.1) and between referential gender and default grammatical gender on
the other (section 3.2). Section 4 is devoted to a brief comparison between the Icelandic
and Faroese gender systems where the main difference is that grammatical masculine has
had the status of default grammatical gender in Icelandic as far back as can be traced
whereas neuter has more of a default status in Faroese. Section 5 sums up the main points
of the paper while section 6 is actually an appendix, which briefly relates the analysis of
gender presented in the paper to certain standardization and reform proposals where
agreement gender has sometimes been recommended instead of referential gender (stan-
dardization) and neuter proposed as default grammatical gender instead of masculine
(feminist reform).

Höskuldur Þráinsson
Íslensku- og menningardeild
Háskóla Íslands
IS-102 Reykjavík, ÍSLAND
hoski@hi.is
Þrjú kyn 51