GENDER EXPRESSION IN BOTH ROMANIAN AND ENGLISH
GENDER EXPRESSION IN BOTH ROMANIAN AND ENGLISH

Summary/Abstract: The paper aims at attempting to be a brief comparative approach of the gender mark for the nouns in English and in Romanian, as the grammatical category of gender is a fundamental one for the nominal flexion in Romanian while in English it is not of a great importance. In both languages there are three classes of nouns divided according to gender: masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. The components of gender, like those of any other grammatical category, are relevant only in comparison with their opposition. As far as the classification of English nouns into masculine, feminine and neuter is concerned, they are classified into three groups of nouns: names of persons, names of animals and names of objects. In view of the fact that in Romania most teachers still prefer – by the way of tradition – using the British variant of English, this paper has been oriented towards that variant. In analyzing gender expression in Romanian and English this paper has revealed both similarities and differences by a contrastive analysis aimed at postulating items meant to construct linguistic universals and to make out a body of instances, which could be used for teaching purposes. This contrastive analysis has revealed some similarities and some differences between the two languages and can be integrated in the teaching process in order to enhance the metalinguistic awareness of students in learning both languages, especially as a second language. The use of corpora is extremely beneficial to the field of contrastive studies allowing for both theoretical and more applied analyses of language.

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