Exercise 3. Give female variants to the following male ones. Comment on means of expressing sex difference (lexical, lexico-morphological, lexico-syntactical)

a) the category of number;

1. There's many a poor respectable mother who doesn't get half the fussing and attention which is lavished on some of these girls! (James)

2. But Hamilton drinks too much and all this crowd of young people drink too much (Fitzgerald).

3. He won't be retiring for another eighteen months (Christie).

4. Michael saw Mrs. Dandy, not quite over her illness, rise to go and be come caught in polite group after group (Fitzgerald).

5. While it grew dark they drank and just before it was dark and there was no longer enough light to shoot, a hyena crossed the open on his way around the hill. "That bastard crosses there every night," the man said.

"Every night for two weeks." "He's the one makes the noise at night. I don't mind it. They are a filthy animal though." (Hemingway).

b) the category of case;

1. The car speed was so slow that it seemed to be crawling (Cheever).

2. Music's voice went to his heart (O. Henry).

3. The hearth was swept, the roses on the piano were reflected in the polish of the broad top, and there was an album of Schubert waltzes on the rack (Cheever).

4. He remembered reading - in a John D. MacDonald novel, he thought - that every modern motel room in America seems filled with mirrors (King).

5. And I expect the whole place is bugged, and everybody knows every body else's most secret conversations (Christie).

c) the category of gender;

1. The old man was soon asleep and dreamed of the ocean and his golden beaches (Hemingway).

2. The moon was rising, blood-red. The boy was looking at her thinking that he had never seen so red a moon (Galsworthy).

3. She shuddered. The child, his own child, was only an "it" to him (Lawrence).

4. When Alice was speaking to the Mouse, she noticed that he was trembling all over with fright (Carroll).

5. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers (O.Henry).

ADJECTIVE

The adjective expresses the categorial meaning of property of a substance, That means that semantically the adjective is a bound word of partial nominative value: it can not be used without a word denoting the substance which it characterizes. As a class of lexical words adjectives are identified by their ability to fill the position between noun-determiner and noun and the position after a copula-verb and a qualifier.

Considered in meaning, adjectives fall into two large groups:

a) qualitative adjectives,

b) relative adjectives.

Qualitative adjectives denote qualities of size, shape, colour, etc. which an object may possess in various degrees. Qualitative adjectives have degrees of comparison.

Relative adjectives express qualities which characterise an object through its relation to another object; wooden tables → tables made of wood, woollen gloves → gloves made of wool, Siberian wheat → wheat from Siberia. Further examples of relative adjectives are: rural, industrial, urban, etc.

Adjectives are distinguished by a specific combinability with the nouns which they modify, with link verbs and with modifying adverbs. The functionsperformed by the adjective correlate with their combinability: when combined with nouns, adjectives perform the function of an attribute (either in preposition to the noun modified or in post-position if accompanied by adjuncts), e.g.: a suspicious man; a man suspicious of his wife; when combined with link verbs they perform the function of a predicative (part of a compound nominal predicate), e.g.: The man was very suspicious of his wife. There are adjectives that can be used only attributively, e.g .: joint (venture), main (point), lone (wolf), live (music) etc.; there are adjectives that are used only predicatively (usually adjectives denoting states and relations), e.g.: glad, fond, concerned, etc.

The category of comparison expresses the quantitative characteristics of the quality rendered by the adjective, in other words, it expresses the relative evaluation of the amount of the quality of some referent in comparison with other referents possessing the same quality. Three forms constitute this category: the positive degree, the comparative degree, and the superlative degree forms of the adjective. The basic form, known as the positive degree, has no special formal mark, e.g.: tall, interesting; the comparative degree is marked by two kinds of forms; synthetical forms with the suffix “-er” and analytical forms with the auxiliary word more, e.g.: taller, more interesting; the superlative degree is also formed either synthetically with the help of the grammatical suffix “-est”, or analytically with the help of the auxiliary word most, e.g.: tallest, most interesting. The synthetic and analytical degrees stand in complementary distribution to each other, their choice is determined by syllabo-phonetic forms of adjectives. Also, there are suppletive forms of the degrees of comparison, e.g.: bad – worse – worst.

In the plane of content the category of comparison constitutes a gradual ternary opposition. To be consistent with the oppositional approach, the category of comparison can be reduced to two binary oppositions correlated with each other in a hierarchy of two levels in the following way: 1. Positive degree / Comparative + Superlative degrees; 2. Comparative degree / Superlative degree.

The opposition can be contextually reduced: the superlative degree can be used instead of the positive degree in contexts where no comparison is meant, to denote a very high degree of a certain quality intensely presented, cf.: She is a most unusual woman (She is an extremely unusual woman); It was most generous of you (It was very generous of you). This kind of grammatical transposition is known as “the elative superlative”. Thus, the superlative degree is used in two senses: the absolute superiority (unrestricted superiority) and the elative superiority (a very high degree of a certain quality). The formal mark of the difference between the two cases is the possibility of indefinite article determination or the use of the zero article with the noun modified by the adjective in the superlative degree, e.g.: It was a most generous gesture; a sensation of deepest regret.