Polish Gender, Subgender, and Quasi-Gender

Abstract

The question as to how many genders there are in Polish has absorbed linguists for well over half a century. Almost everyone approaching this question has applied a different criterion to the exclusion of other criteria in order to obtain an answer, and answers have ranged from every number from three though nine, or even more. One matter that has never been given due importance is the evidence of third-person pronouns which, in both nominative and accusative cases, would seem to have come into existence partly in order to be able to refer to nouns by their gender. All told, evidence points to the existence of four main Polish grammatical genders, consisting of the traditional three (masculine, feminine, neuter) and the Polish innovative one of “masculine personal.” These comprise a tightly knit coherent system. Other gender candidates can be considered to be either “subgenders” (masculine animate and masculine depreciative) or “quasi-genders,” of which there are around half a dozen. The existence and behaviors of the quasi-genders, i.e., nouns that would appear to belong to one gender but can act like another (an example being “facultative animate” nouns, i.e., referentially inanimate nouns that behave as if animate) shows that users of the language remain sensitive to mismatches between declension-type, gender, and sexual or animate reference, and will allow referential reality to assert itself against grammatical gender in accordance with Corbett’s observation as to the increasing instability of agreement targets the farther they are from the agreement controller.

Eyetracking evidence for heritage speakers’ access to abstract syntactic agreement features in real-time processing

“…Polish is generally considered to have three (global) genders-masculine, feminine, neuter-as there is evidence for three gender categories in the citation form in the nominative singular, as illustrated in (1). There are some subcategories within the masculine based on animacy, and while there has been some debate concerning the status of these subcategories, formal analyses of Polish as having three global genders and possible subgenders of masculine (Corbett, 1983) are the most widely accepted (for an overview, see Swan, 2015), and are assumed by existing work on the acquisition of Polish gender by monolingual and bilingual children (Brehmer and Rothweiler, 2012).…”

“…Given that nominal morphophonology does not uniquely determine the gender category of a noun, the most reliable cue to grammatical gender, as generally established in formal work in this domain, is the agreement patterns that a noun determines on "associated words" in the nominal phrase (Hockett, 1958). In Polish, agreement is pervasive within the noun phrase, as gender category-as well as number and case-determine inflectional marking on attributive adjectives, relative pronouns, and demonstratives, as well as outside of the nominal phrase on predicative adjectives and verbs in certain tenses (Swan, 2015) (2). The default gender agreement for inanimate nouns in Polish is neuter, as evidenced by inflectional morphology in instances with no referent (3a) or with a genderless nominal (3b)environments in which gender information is either absent or underspecified and therefore default gender agreement rules are deployed (Corbett and Fraser, 1999;Haspelmath, 2006).…”