Gender agreement in English

[Jonlang]

I got thinking about how modern English, especially the simple every day spoken British English, uses certain words for referring to males and females. The words which got me thinking are handsome and pretty. They are used nowadays to mean the same thing, but it's always "a handsome man" or "a pretty woman". I know that historically "handsome" was used to describe females but it really isn't anymore, not outside of literary works or in an archaic sense. Are there any other examples of where we do this in English?

[linguoboy]

The words which got me thinking are handsome and pretty. They are used nowadays to mean the same thing, but it's always "a handsome man" or "a pretty woman".

Perhaps that's the usage in your milieu, but it's absolutely not true elsewhere. I've heard straight women describe straight men as "pretty" and YMMV but I'm not sure I'd describe a pop song by the band Panic at the Disco! as "a literary work".

[mèþru]

Describing a woman as handsome or a man as pretty used to implicate that they are androgynous and unattractive. As androgyny is increasingly seen as something unnecessarily attractive and strict gender roles are disappearing, it is now becoming more common to refer to men as being pretty with being insulting. I have not heard of this new usage being extended to using the word handsome for women

[linguoboy]

Describing a woman as handsome or a man as pretty used to implicate that they are androgynous and unattractive. As androgyny is increasingly seen as something unnecessarily attractive and strict gender roles are disappearing, it is now becoming more common to refer to men as being pretty with being insulting. I have not heard of this new usage being extended to using the word handsome for women

That's about as ahistorical an analysis as I could ever have hoped to see. There is nothing "new" about either the appeal of androgyny or the use of these words to positively describe people of both genders.

Moreover, I have never seen an example of "pretty" used to imply that a man is unattractive. (In fact, more often to imply the opposite, i.e. that they are somehow too attractive, which is an undignified/dangerous thing for a man to be.)

When I saw the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about actual gender agreement in English, i.e. the near-obsolete use of blond for men and blonde for women. Gender-dependent connotations of adjectives are a different phenomenon from "agreement" as that word is used in linguistics.

[Zaarin]

Handsome can definitely be applied to a woman, but IMD it implies that she's older and has aged well rather than being young and attractive. On which note, I'd say that beautiful of a woman is a much closer analogy to handsome of a man--to me, pretty suggests youthfulness and possibly a lesser degree than beautiful. E.g., Ezri Dax is "pretty," Jadzia Dax is "beautiful." (Personal opinion, obviously...)

[Jonlang]

When I saw the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about actual gender agreement in English, i.e. the near-obsolete use of blond for men and blonde for women. Gender-dependent connotations of adjectives are a different phenomenon from "agreement" as that word is used in linguistics.

Yeah... sorry about that.

[linguoboy]

Yeah... sorry about that.

No big, it's hard to find the right vocabulary to pithily describe these inquiries sometimes. "Gendered" isn't a term of art most people outside of the social sciences are familiar with.

There are some adjectives which are used pretty exclusively with one gender or the other. Strident is one. I basically stopped using it when I realised that, in reference to people, it is only applied to women and always pejoratively. (Cf. "uppity".)

[zompist]

There's a whole literature on gendered language, though honestly I haven't read much of it. Some names to start with, at least, would be Robin Lakoff, Suzette Haden Elgin, and Deborah Tannen.

"Pretty" is prototypically used about women, but it's by no means always the case. E.g. Google finds 90,000 instances of "pretty boyfriend". "Pretty girlfriend" has 497,000 results, which is less of an imbalance than I would have expected.

Google finds 11.6 million instances of "pretty woman", just 602,000 of "handsome man". It's about that imbalanced with most adjectives I could think of that describe appearance. Seems like people like to write about female appearance more...

Non-appearance words: "sweet" is far more associated with women; "loving" (curiously) with men. No great imbalance on words like "smart", "strong", "powerful", or "evil". But at this point it's getting tedious to search because Google is giving me a captcha on every search, because they hate SCIENCE.

[Jonlang]

Google finds 11.6 million instances of "pretty woman", just 602,000 of "handsome man". It's about that imbalanced with most adjectives I could think of that describe appearance.

Yeah but how many of those results are for the movie? Terms like "pretty girl" or "pretty lady" could well have fewer matches.

[KathTheDragon]

"pretty girl": 53.3 million
"pretty lady": 16.5 million
"handsome boy": 5.96 million

[Viktor77]

When I saw the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about actual gender agreement in English, i.e. the near-obsolete use of blond for men and blonde for women. Gender-dependent connotations of adjectives are a different phenomenon from "agreement" as that word is used in linguistics.

But can we really call that gender agreement in English? It is in essence gender agreement in French that we simply borrowed, akin to fiancé, fiancée, né, née. I'm not so sure I'd go as far as saying that it's grammatical in English. Of the same vain, it's like considering -a to be a valid English plural form when it's just a borrowing of the Latin plural.

[linguoboy]

But can we really call that gender agreement in English?

Yes.

It is in essence gender agreement in French that we simply borrowed, akin to fiancé, fiancée, né, née.

Your point being what exactly? That morphosyntax can't be borrowed? That we should ignore all marginal phenomena in our analysis?

I'm not so sure I'd go as far as saying that it's grammatical in English. Of the same vain, it's like considering -a to be a valid English plural form when it's just a borrowing of the Latin plural.

Which makes it invalid...how? Pluralising morphemes can be borrowed, you know.

If a subset of nouns in English pluralise by means of an ending -a, what grounds are there for saying that's not a valid English plural? Compare -i, which has not only been generalised well beyond its attested use in Latin (e.g. octopi, peni, Prii) but even to words with no Latin equivalents (e.g. apprenti) and no Latin etyma (e.g. Elvi).

[clawgrip]

I think you also need to keep in mind societal factors, namely that, regardless of the adjectives used, you're probably going to find more results describing the appearance of women than of men. So pretty/handsome/beautiful may not be the best test words.

[richard1631978]

Google finds 11.6 million instances of "pretty woman", just 602,000 of "handsome man". It's about that imbalanced with most adjectives I could think of that describe appearance.

Yeah but how many of those results are for the movie? Terms like "pretty girl" or "pretty lady" could well have fewer matches.

Pretty woman has been the title of both a song & a film so that would bump the numbers up.

[zompist]

I don't think it's the movie that makes people think that women might be pretty.

[clawgrip]

Certainly not, but I do think it's the movie (and song) that increases Google hits, meaning that using Google to test the frequency of the term in other contexts will give you an out of proportion result, since Google does not differentiate them.

[zompist]

Searching for "Sleepless in Seattle" or "Harry Met Sally", romantic comedies of the same period, gives half a million hits. So if you subtracted that from the 11.6 million hits for "pretty woman", you still have 11.1 million hits.

In any case, my point is that "pretty" and "handsome" are not very parallel; "pretty" is far more common. (About 8 times more common, says Google.)

[clawgrip]

Point taken, although I feel I should point out that Pretty Woman actually won an Oscar and was the breakout film for one of the most bankable stars of the next couple decades, things the other two cannot claim (granted, Sleepless in Seattle does star Tom Hanks, one of the most bankable stars ever, but it certainly doesn't rank among his best films). The first two pages of results on Google have only one hit that is not about the film (it's about 1000s Cute Russian Women - Sexy Russian Hotties to Blow You Away‎).

Not to mention that (Oh) Pretty Woman is also a Roy Orbison song, covered by many other artists, so you have multiple hits for the original song and basically every cover of it.

But anyway I believe your point stands.

[Richard W]

But can we really call that gender agreement in English? It is in essence gender agreement in French that we simply borrowed, akin to fiancé, fiancée, né, née. I'm not so sure I'd go as far as saying that it's grammatical in English. Of the same vain, it's like considering -a to be a valid English plural form when it's just a borrowing of the Latin plural.

The only gender agreement morphology in prototypical adjectives in Coptic is the Greek gender marking. The gender marking in native prototypical adjectives has been levelled away through phonetic attrition. The article retains gender and number marking, so it fits the system.

Irregular plurals are a feature of native English words, so foreign plurals are not a great strain on the system. They are, though, a strain on memory. The contrast of fiancé and fiancée is in principle no different than husband v. wife; it's oddity is simply that the lexicon of written English has two words, while that of spoken English has but one.

[Sumelic]

But can we really call that gender agreement in English?

Yes.

It is in essence gender agreement in French that we simply borrowed, akin to fiancé, fiancée, né, née.

Your point being what exactly? That morphosyntax can't be borrowed? That we should ignore all marginal phenomena in our analysis?

If a subset of nouns in English pluralise by means of an ending -a, what grounds are there for saying that's not a valid English plural? Compare -i, which has not only been generalised well beyond its attested use in Latin (e.g. octopi, peni, Prii) but even to words with no Latin equivalents (e.g. apprenti) and no Latin etyma (e.g. Elvi).

I think Richard W's point is more important here: there is no agreement in spoken English. People frequently "misspell" blond(e) and fiancé(e). They aren't good examples at all for "borrowed gender agreement," especially not "fiancé(e)," which isn't even an adjective.

I think a better case can be made for Latino/Latina being a word with borrowed gender agreement, since the two forms are actually distinguished in speech and it can be used as an adjective, not just a noun (for example, in sentences like "She's Latina" or ""She's not Latina enough").

Anyway, to return to the original subject of the thread, here's a relevant recent Language Log post: The new AI is so lifelike it's prejudiced!

[Nortaneous]

the implications of using 'pretty' to describe men vary heavily depending on subculture and it is not possible to generalize about its meaning

[jmcd]

@Sumelic: You kind of have a point but 'fiancée' is misspelt in the original French as well; it is not distinguished in pronunciation there either.

[clawgrip]

Fiancé vs. fiancée just resembles French gender agreement patterns, which is confusing the issue. Having words for both fiancé and fiancée is no more gender agreement than having words for husband and wife, man and woman, etc., i.e. in none of these cases is there any grammatical agreement of any kind taking place.

[gmalivuk]

Rather than arguing abstractly about the influence of the movie on Google web hits, just do a case-swnsitive ngrams search that excludes (properly capitalized) movie titles?

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c ... 29%3B%2Cc0

Fiancé vs. fiancée just resembles French gender agreement patterns, which is confusing the issue. Having words for both fiancé and fiancée is no more gender agreement than having words for husband and wife, man and woman, etc., i.e. in none of these cases is there any grammatical agreement of any kind taking place.

Except, "husband" and "wife" are not masculine and feminine forms of the same root word. The two words for "betrothed" in French are, and they come from an adjective form as far as I know, which puts them in the blond/blonde category of genuine gender agreement.

[Sumelic]

Rather than arguing abstractly about the influence of the movie on Google web hits, just do a case-swnsitive ngrams search that excludes (properly capitalized) movie titles?

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c ... 29%3B%2Cc0

Fiancé vs. fiancée just resembles French gender agreement patterns, which is confusing the issue. Having words for both fiancé and fiancée is no more gender agreement than having words for husband and wife, man and woman, etc., i.e. in none of these cases is there any grammatical agreement of any kind taking place.

Except, "husband" and "wife" are not masculine and feminine forms of the same root word. The two words for "betrothed" in French are, and they come from an adjective form as far as I know, which puts them in the blond/blonde category of genuine gender agreement.

The etymological origin of the word is irrelevant to its current grammatical status in English. For example, afraid was originally a past participle, but it now an adjective. Nouns that are lexically specified for gender are not "genuine gender agreement" as it is normally understood. And as people have already described, the "agreement" is purely graphical anyway; using it to argue for gender agreement in English is like using the variant characters for "ta" in Mandarin Chinese to argue that that language has grammatical gender.