The Communicative Function of Gender in Italian

Joseph Davis

Languages that have “grammatical gender” present a serious challenge to learners of the language: What does the language user get in return for surmounting this apparent challenge?  Here is the problem for the linguistic analyst:  Certain lexical items in Italian are associated with one of two lexical classes (the “genders"), but this association does not involve any choice of morphology on the part of the user (such words can end in anything: a, o, e, i, s . . .), so that is not the problem.  The choices that get made, rather, concern other elements (regularly suffixes a, e, o, i) by means of which the user can establish an allusion to some member of one of the two classes.  The possibilities range from cases where the alluded-to item is adjacent in the context (Prendo il prossimo treno 'I'm taking the next train'), to cases where it is more distant (Ho fallito il primo treno; devo prendere il prossimo ‘I missed the first train; I’ll have to take the next'), to cases where nothing is present in context at all (Che strano! 'How strange!'), and even to cases where an association with a closely cooccurring candidate is overridden, with an allusion to a less obvious association (la mia nuova San Marco 'my new San Marco,' alluding to a coffee macchina 'machine').  The solution to the problem is a system of morphologically signaled meanings.  Though the analysis concerns primarily “grammatical gender,” it stands to inform too the use of Italian in communication having to do with human cultural gender.

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