Questão 963985

Instruction: answer questions 36 to 40 based on the following text. The highligths throughout the text are cited in the questions .

How gender bends gender

01_____ English does not have grammatical gender – nouns are not classified as “masculine” or

02 “feminine” as they are in other European languages. But we do have words that denote gender,

03 like man or girl. There is no grammatical agreement for gender for adjectives in English, but

04 there is the weight of precedent. The frequency with which we encounter any given pairing

05 influences the way we ourselves use a given adjective. Take our use of the adjective handsome,

06 for instance.

07 _____ We typically use handsome to refer to an attractive man and beautiful to refer to anWe typically use handsome to refer to an attractive man and beautiful to refer to an

08 attractive woman. But these uses aren’t governed by grammar, they are governed by convention.

09 The fact is, handsome woman was formerly much more commonly used than it is today. Even

10 though their current use is more or less parallel in meaning, handsome and beautiful have very

11 different histories. These histories are observable in the spelling of these words: beautiful means

12 “full of beauty”, coming from the French word beauté. Handsome originally meant “well-suited

13 to the hands” of a tool or weapon, then jumped from referring to the thing wielded to the person

14 doing the wielding to mean “good with the hands” or “dexterous”. It then came to mean “clever”

15 or “fitting”. This idea of appropriateness or suitability led handsome to mean “elegant, well-

16 proportioned”, and finally to a rough synonym of beautiful.

17 _____ This history of handsome shows that the word always had essentially pragmatic roots inThis history of handsome shows that the word always had essentially pragmatic roots in

18 English, rather than the purely esthetic meanings of beautiful through time. Maybe this deep

19 background of the word’s use has contributed to the evolution of handsome as a near-synonym

20 of beautiful, but one with different connotations. So handsome is settling into an identity after

21 more than 400 years of usage. It means something slightly different when used of a man or of

22 a woman, showing that parallel adjectives are not perfectly logical or equal.

(Available in: https://www.languagemagazine.com/2022/03/16/how-gender-bends-meaning/ – text especially adapted for this test).

Analyse the following statements about the text:

I. Unlike European languages, English nouns referring to people do not have separate forms for men and women.

II. The adjective “handsome” was never used to refer to an attractive woman.

III. Both “beautiful” and “handsome” have very similar histories, associated with esthetic meanings.

Which statements are correct?