The category of gender

Most of the English linguists consider that there is no category of gender in ME, though the noun had this category in OE - masculine -fisc - fish, feminine - caru - care, neutral - scipu - ship»

Linguists say that gender in ME is expressed lexically by means of suffixes and compound words: waiter - waitress, he wolf - she wolf, a girlfriend - a boyfriend, a Tom cat - a Pussy cat.

Prof. Bloch considers that the noun in ME has the category of gender and this category is expressed by the correlation of nouns with personal pronouns - Look at the student, she is beautiful. Look at the student, he is very ugly. In the category of gender we find the opposition of person nouns and non-person nouns. The person nouns form the marked member of the opposition, they are marked in meaning because they denote a person. The non-person nouns form the unmarked member of the opposition, they don’t denote a person /tree, table/,(it). Within the marked member of the opposition we also find the opposition between feminine nouns /girl/ and masculine nouns /boy/. Some nouns are capable to express both feminine and masculine gender: parent, friend, doctor (they)-doctor’s.