Category of gender

The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender.

Ukrainian: masculine, feminine, neuter

English is characterized by an absence of the morphological category of gender:

The great emperor lived long

The great actress lives long

The great idea lived long

All lifeless things in English are associated with the pronoun IT (the neuter gender)

When personified English lifeless nouns may be referred to different: Reed and Swallow in Happy Prince by Oscar Wild); death, war – “he” in English

Suffix –ess (as in: actress, tigress, poetess, etc.) express sex, and not the morphological gender.

While grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in Old English, Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender and therefore often expressed at the lexical level.

MASCULINE	FEMININE
actor author bachelor bridegroom host husband king landlord lord man manager wizard	actress authoress spinster bride hostess wife queen landlady lady woman manageress witch

CREATURES

MASCULINE	FEMININE
cock dog fox gander he-bear he-goat he-wolf stallion tiger	hen bitch vixen goose she-bear she-goat she-wolf mare tigress

   

CATEGORY OF CASE

Ukrainian: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative

English: common case // genitive case

POSSSESSIVE OR GENITIVE?

In grammar, the genitive case is the case that marks a noun as modifying another noun. It often marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun but it can also indicate various relationships other than possession.

The English construction in -’s has various uses other than a possessive marker. Most of these uses overlap with a complement marked by "of" (the music of Beethoven or Beethoven’s music), but the two constructions are not equivalent. The use of -’s in a non-possessive sense is more prevalent, and less restricted, in formal than informal language.

Genitive of origin; subjective genitive

• Beethoven’s music
• My sister’s dancing
• my mother’s teaching

In these constructions, the marker indicates the origin or source of the head noun of the phrase, rather than possession. Most of these phrases, however, can still be paraphrased with of: the music of Beethoven, the teaching of my mother.

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