Grammatical gender in ancient linguistics: issues involving gender agreement

Gender agreement is essential in defining gender and establishing the genders of a language (see Greville Corbett, Gender, Cambridge University Press 1991 [repr. 1999], 105 ff.). No notion of agreement is involved in the definition of gender in ancient linguistics, and for obvious reasons. There was no part of speech corresponding to our adjective, no distinction between what Corbett calls controller genders, “the genders into which nouns are divided” and target genders, “the genders which are marked on adjectives, verbs and so on” (Corbett, 151). Borrowing Pierre Swiggers’ and Alfons Wouters’ phrasing in their preface to the Syntax in Antiquity (edited by P. Swiggers and A. Wouters, Orbis/Supplementa, Peeters 2003, 5), it can be said that “syntactic issues are obliquely, fragmentarily or cryptically present” in ancient texts. That the Greek and Latin adjectives, pronouns and participles agree in gender and that there are special problems related to this are, nonetheless, issues that were touched upon in ancient linguistics, although with insufficient metalanguage and in diverse contexts. While the context of an implicit involvement of gender agreement is often a discussion of solecism, Apollonius refers to agreement in gender and number in connection with transitivity, for instance (Synt. GG II.2 281, 7 ff.).
In this paper, I will discuss the ways in which gender agreement or gender in construction is visible in ancient sources. The focus is very much on the contexts and motives for discussing these matters. The sources are both those that approach the matter from the point of view of theory and mostly use gender agreement as an example in defining solecism, and those that represent a practical approach to texts. Among the latter are Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ critical treatises (see Casper de Jonge, Between Grammar and Rhetoric, 2008; e.g. 266 ff. for examples), Servius’ commentary on Vergil (see Jaana Vaahtera, `On grammatical gender in ancient linguistics – the order of genders´, Arctos 42, 2008, 258), and the scholia on Homer. To give just one example from the last mentioned, we may learn, for instance, that φίλε τέκνον is said “instead of φίλον τέκνον” in Od. 3,184: “Or he [Homer] adapted it to the meaning: for τέκνον ‘child’ is φίλος ‘dear’ [masculine] even if the word is neuter. Or the masculine is due to the synonym παῖς ‘child’ [masculine or feminine].”