The Use of Gender Markers in Animals

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.