English (En)Gendered: How Underlying Morphosyntactic and Sociopragmatic Agreement Affects the Classification of Language by Gender

Abstract

In a society where “gender” is a word with many definitions, categorizing language by type of linguistic gender can be prone to inaccuracy. This thesis will serve to argue that the current way of classifying languages by gender agreement in formal linguistics is in need of reform. The current grammatical gender, natural gender, and genderless distinctions are insufficient for accurately categorizing agreement systems within languages because none of these categories take sociopragmatic factors into account. Using English as the main example, this thesis will present evidence to support the claim that languages shouldn’t be classified with respect to gender by the mere presence of morphosyntactic gender agreement, but instead by how specifically the agreement aligns with mappings of other kinds of “gender.” This thesis will offer a more streamlined way to conceptualize gender within the field of formal linguistics, as well as cross-linguistic evidence as to the faulty nature of the current “grammatical gender,” “natural gender,” and “genderless” categories. In doing so, this paper will find that a more accurate classification system would utilize a gradient, spectrum-like scale rather than rigid, categorical boxes in order to encapsulate how social factors in discourse can influence agreement processes in language.