The Use of Gender Markers in Animals

The author analyses gender assignment to animal nouns. She looks at grammarians' treatment of gender in present-day English and surveys a corpus of National Geographic and the Journal of Zoology.

This book is a contribution to the study of the linguistic concept of gender. It focuses 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, scientific discussions or papers. The detailed analysis of gender assignment to animal names is based on two subcorpora: the English edition of National Geographic and the English edition of the Journal of Zoology. The book closes with a contrastive analysis of gender markers.

Autorentext

Ludmila Zemková is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Faculty of Education, University of South Bohemia, eské Bud jovice. She studied at the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University in Brno. Her research interests include the linguistic concept of gender and gender in present-day English.

Inhalt

Contents: Gender - Animal nouns - Present-day English - National Geographic - Journal of Zoology - Gender markers - Gender assignment.