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International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (IJTSRD)
Special Issue on Innovative Development of Modern Research
Available Online: www.ijtsrd.com e-ISSN: 2456 – 6470

The Problems of Analyzing the Lexico-Semantic

Category of Gender in the English and Uzbek Languages

Atadjanova Mukhayyo Akhmadjanovna

English Teacher of Foreign Languages Department, Tashkent State University of
Uzbek Language and Literature Named After Alisher Navoi, Uzbekistan

ABSTRACT however, one qualification. There is a difference between the
This article discusses the problems of analyzing the lexico- use of the pronouns for animals and for humans. it may be
semantic category of gender in the English and Uzbek used for animals, e. g. to refer to a dog, and so may he or she if
languages, as well as the lexico-semantic comparison the sex is known. However, with humans it cannot be used,
ofgender in theEnglish and Russian languages. even if the sex is unknown. For the indefinite unknown

human the forms they. them, their are used in colloquial
KEYWORDS: gender, sex, grammatical gender, lexico- English (even for singular) as in Has anyone lost their hat? If
semantic meaning, male, female, animal, masculine, feminine, anyone comes tell them to go away. This is frowned on by
neuter gender some grammarians, but seems to me to be a useful and
wholly acceptable device for avoiding the indication of sex.
The term gender refers to the socially constructed categories For reference to a specific human whose sex is unknown, e. g.
male and female, and not to such grammatical categories as a baby, it is sometimes used, but it is probab1y wiser to ask
‘masculine’, ‘feminine’, ‘neuter’ or ‘common’. The study of the mother first 'Is it a boy or a girl?'
language in relation to gender has two main foci. First, it has
been observed by many linguists that men adwomen speak Many languages have noun classes that function
differently; and second, it has been observed by many grammatically like the gender classes of the Indo-European
feminists and by some linguists that men and women are and Semitic languages. Thus, in Swahili, there are classes of
spoken about differently, and it is often claimed that the animates, of small things and of big things, each class clearly
language is discriminatory against women. indicated formally by an appropriate prefix and requiring
agreement with adjectives and verbs. These are often
Differences in male and female language use began to be referred to as gender -classes. If we are thinking primarily of
noticed at least as early as the seventeenth century in the the grammatical function, that they are classes of nouns that
societies visited by missionaries and explorers, and the require agreement with adjectives and verbs, the term
interest these differences caused often led to claims that in
'gender' is appropriate, since that is essentially the
some societies men and women spoke completely different grammatical function of gender in the more familiar
languages. languages. But, of course, it may be argued that some other
This, however, is an overstatement– what tends to happen to term that does not suggest a relation with sex should be
varying degrees in various societies is that the gender of a found (though the purist might be reminded that
speaker will determine or increase the likelihood of choices etymologically gender is not related to sex, but merely means
of certain phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical 'kind'). Even with noun classes of the type that are not
forms of a language while precluding or diminishing the related to sex we find that there is no precise
likelihood of certain other choices. correspondence between formal class and its meaning. Not
all the nouns of the 'small things' class in Swahili are small,
We shall not expect to find an exact correlation between while Bloomfield relates that in the Algonquian languages of
gender and sex. Indeed sometimes we have a surprising North America there is a grammatical distinction between
contrast as in the French of 'the male mouse' which is la animate and inanimate nouns, but that both 'kettle' and
souris mate ('the (feminine) male mouse'), for souris is a 'raspberry' belong to the class of animates, though
feminine noun. Similarly we noted Miidchen and Priiulein and 'strawberry' is inanimate[3;128].
la sentinelle in the previous section. Yet although in some
cases the gender is wholly idiosyncratic, we can at other We have similarly noted anomalies with number.
times see some regularity. The German words are neuter Semantically, the question of enumeration does not seem to
because all words with the diminutive ending -chen and olein be a very important one. Many languages have grammatical
are neuter, while in French occupational names such as number systems, but others in various parts of the world (e.
sentinelle are all feminine. The explanation then lies in g., South-East Asia, West Africa) do not. Moreover, it is
historical facts, which have overruled the obvious semantic difficult to see why SEMANTICALLY the essential distinction
probability that male creatures will be referred to by should be between singular ('one') and plural ('more than
masculine nouns and female creatures by feminine one'). Many languages make this distinction in their
ones[1;208]. grammar, but not all. Some classical languages Sanskrit,
Greek and Arabic - had, in addition, dual - referring to two
There is no real problem in English, for English has, strictly, objects. Other languages, e. g. Fijian and Tigre (Ethiopia),
no grammatical gender at all. It has, of course, the pronouns have distinctions of 'little plurals' and 'big plurals' too. If we
he, she and it, but these are essentially markers of sex. The look at the problem of counting objectively it is not at all
first two, he and she, are used if the sex is specifically obvious that there are any 'natural" numerical classes that
indicated or known; otherwise it is used [2;25]. There is,

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