michigoose and michigas

[Laurence Horn]

(sorry about the old-newsiness; I've been away from my e-mail)

At 3:23 PM -0400 7/17/00, Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote:
>Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> writes:
>
>>>>>>
>At 3:04 PM -0400 7/13/00, Frank Abate wrote:
>>Michigander is the fem. form.  The masc. is Michigoose.
>
>vice versa, rather.  "goose" is one of the relatively rare birds and beasts
>in which the female is the unmarked.
><<<<<
>
>ISTM* that this set consists of those species (word used loosely) whose
>female produces either eggs or milk that are economically useful:
>     cow
>     chicken
>     goose
>     duck
>
I agree with the generalization (as a NECESSARY but not SUFFICIENT
condition for female-genericity), or would agree if it were further
generalized along the lines of "species [etc.] whose female members are
more functionally useful to English speakers than their male counterparts
are", but question the inclusion of chickens among these.  I thought the
hens were the (specific) egg-layers, and they don't generify.  Chickens for
me are non-gender-specific (aren't roosters and hens both chickens?  I'm
from NYC so I can't be sure).  I do share Mark's intuition on cows,
although (as John Lyons pointed out in his discussion of markedness in his
1977 SEMANTICS) the facts are slightly different for cows (vs. bulls) than
for e.g. lions/lionesses, dogs/bitches, or geese/ganders:  as he puts it,
"a lioness is a female lion" is OK, while "a bull is a female cow" only
works as a 'metalinguistic gloss'.  At the same time, though, you can (or
at least John Lyons, Mark, and I can) point to a mixed-sex bunch of
domestic cattle and refer to them as cows.

larry