“A Study of Assigned Gender in Astrological Vocabulary” 41st AEDEAN Conference, Universidad de La Laguna, 2017. (original) (raw)

The aim of this paper is to carry out an analysis of the gender of different astrological terms in various texts from the Old English (hereafter OE) and Middle English (henceforth ME) periods in order to study gender variation from a diachronic point of view. The OE period was characterised by grammatical gender, an “overt concordance category, with word shape as the basic criteria for the grouping of nouns under three labels: masculine, femenine and neuter” (Guzmán-González, 1999: 37). Subsequently, the OE noun (ModE ), is a masculine noun ending in <-a>, whereas OE (ModE ), which also belongs to the weak declension, is a feminine noun ending in . Nevertheless, during the ME period, the loss of inflection entailed the disappearance of “overt marking within the noun phrase” (Guzmán-González, 1999: 38). However, this breakdown was not sudden, and grammatical gender survived during the ME period “to a limited extent supported by gender distinctions in demonstratives and personal pronouns” (Fernández-Domínguez, 2007: 52). Determiners and pronouns agree with the nouns they are referring to and they act as distinctive gender markers. Therefore, it is possible to find a variety of masculine anaphoric and cataphoric references for the OE masculine and feminine ones for OE noun . However, when addressing astrological terms, the assignment of a different gender is also likely, as it depends “on the attitude towards the referent” (Fernández-Domínguez, 2017: 54). This fact will be studied and illustrated with examples taken from different corpora. First of all, The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus and the Middle English Medical Texts, a resource which compiles records from medical texts written in English and which also contains information on medical astrological tracts. Finally, I will also use my own corpus, which includes five manuscripts from different British libraries that I have transcribed myself: Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 513; British Library, MS Harley 2378, British Library, MS Additional 12195 and British Library, MS Sloane 73 as well as Royal College of Physicians MS 384. The results of this study will not only reveal that the gender assigned to astrological terms is not invariable, as the same noun can be used as masculine or feminine, but will also provide an explanation of the different contexts and reasons why one gender or another is used.