The pronoun: grammatical and semantic characteristics

The pronoun is a notional part of speech however different, for it does not denote a thing but points out to it: it is the word whose reference is determined by the context of its utterance. So, they can be called deictic means.

Traditional classification of pronouns: personal, possessive, interrogative, relative, demonstrative, indefinite, negative, etc. Some pronouns have the category of case and number. Two cases: nominative and objective (I / me, he / him). Somebody, anybody, one, and few others have the common and the genitive cases. This and that have the plural form to make reference to more than one beings or things.

Some scholars find the category of gender in she / he, her / his, some do not (Ilyish).

The same forms can have two meanings, e.g. that is the relative and the demonstrative and others. The difference is evident in an utterance where the pronoun has the definite syntactic position and function.

Some pronouns have features and sometimes categories of the other parts of speech. The very topical case is the pronoun ‘many’ which has the features of the adjective: it can be an attribute, e.g. many books and the degree of comparison, e.g. many-more-most. Possessive and demonstrative pronouns are, sometimes, called possessive and demonstrative adjectives because they have some adjectival characteristics. Thus, the definition of word class can be possible on the morphological or syntactical, or referential, or functional grounds.

The conceptualization of gender could be interpreted as “things we treat differently because of their inherent differences”. The term has three common applications in contemporary English. Most commonly, it is applied to the general differences between male and female entities, without any overt assumptions regarding biology or sociology. Sometimes, however, the usage is technical or overtly assumes a particular theory of human nature, which is usually made clear from the context. Finally, gender is also commonly applied to the independent concept of distinctive word categories in certain languages. English grammatical gender has little or nothing to do with differences between female and male. Others argue that the linguistic differentiation of women actually reflects women being «more» valued than men, not less. In the English literature, the trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social sex role first appeared in a feminist paper on trans-sexualism in 1978.

Gender in the English language has been the focus of two distinct contemporary debates. Mid-20th century academics raised questions about whether English rightly may be said to possess grammatical gender. The second wave of feminism promoted general minimization of gender reference in language.

Benjamin Whorf considered grammatical gender to be a covert category in English. The word ‘gender’ became attested more widely in the context of grammar, than in making sexual distinctions. The category of English gender has undergone some serious changes in the course of time.

While grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in Old English, Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender. There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English: Some loanwords inflect according to gender, such as actor/actress, where the suffix -or denotes the masculine, and the suffix -ress denotes the feminine. Feminine forms of Latin-derived words may also use -rix, as in aviatrix. English has no live productive gender markers. An example is the suffix -ette (of French provenance), but it is seldom used, and mostly with disparaging or humorous intent. The English nouns that inflect for gender are a very small minority, typically loanwords from non-Germanic.

But these are insignificant features compared to a typical language with grammatical gender: The third-person singular forms of the personal pronouns are the only modifiers that inflect according to gender.

It is also noteworthy that, with few exceptions, the gender of an English pronoun coincides with the real gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent, frequently different from the former in languages with true grammatical gender. The choice between “he”, “she” and “it” invariably comes down to whether they designate a male or female human or animal of a known sex, or something else [11, p.36].

The third person singular pronouns (and their possessive forms) are gender specific: “he/his” (masculine gender, overall used for males), “she/her(s)” (feminine gender, for females), “it/its” (neuter gender, mainly for objects and abstractions), “one/one's” (common gender, for anyone or anything). There are two manifestations of gender-based pronoun selection in English:

The third person singular personal pronouns he/him, she/her, and it (as well as their possessive forms his, her(s), and its, and their reflexive and intensive forms himself, herself, and itself) are chosen according to the natural gender of the antecedent with some notable exceptions.

The relative pronouns «who» and «which» are chosen according to the personal or animate (vs. impersonal or inanimate) status of the antecedent. In Russian these relative pronouns are gender sensitive (который, которая, которое).

In their nominative singular forms Russian nouns are typically feminine if they have the ending -a, neuter when they end with -o, -e, and masculine if they have no gender suffix (null morpheme) or have the ending -a. Thus, дружба is feminine, “дерево” is neuter, and “орех” is masculine. When the adjective “крепкий” is combined with these nouns in phrases, it changes form according to their grammatical gender [14, p.49]. However, they are agreed not only grammatically but also semantically, ‘крепкий кофе’ Thus, the Russian gender is distinct formally due to special grammatical markers, and semantically thanks to a particular way of conceptualization (semantic and grammatical category). Sometimes, semantics prevails over the formal assignment of grammatical gender (semantic agreement дядя – хороший дядя masculine). However, in Russian, grammatical gender is most obviously noticeable by noun morphology. Since nouns that refer to male persons usually end in -a or a consonant and nouns that refer to female persons usually end in -a, most other nouns that end in -o are treated as neuter.

Gender in English does of course still exist, but in nouns such as brother, sister, actor, actress, he, she. What differs in English is that the article is now neutral in all cases. One note of interest is that adjectives in English never change due to gender. Except one word. Blond (masculine) and blonde (feminine).

English is rarely regarded as having grammatical gender, since it does not make gender distinctions through inflection, and does not generally require gender agreement between related words. Although gender marking is not significant in modern English, some distinctions in personal pronouns have been inherited from Old English, in which nouns had grammatical gender, giving speakers of Modern English a notion of how grammatical gender works, although these gendered pronouns are now ordinarily selected based on the physical sex (or lack thereof) of the items to which they refer rather than any strictly linguistic classification:

John insisted that he would pay for his own dinner.

Jane insisted that she would pay for her own dinner.

As can be seen, the neuter gender in Russian does not include all nouns that correspond to genderless realities. Some of these realities may be designated by nouns that are grammatically masculine or feminine ‘стол’ or ‘ручка’. Also, some nouns that refer to males or females may have a different grammatical gender. The grammatical gender of a word does not always coincide with real gender of its referent. An often cited example is the German word Mдdchen, which means «girl», but is treated grammatically as neuter. This is because it was constructed as the diminutive of Magd (maidservant; archaic nowadays), and the diminutive suffix -chen conventionally places nouns in the «neuter» noun class.

In English, similarly, one can refer to a baby-girl or baby-boy using the ‘it’ which is gender-neutral. The reason must be the fact that a baby is not enough old to be considered as a sensible person.

In Russian gender is also marked in the verbs, thus it agrees with the gender of the speaker or doer of an action Я (ты, он, она) купил(а) ручку. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way.

In the plural, the masculine is often used to refer to a mixed group of people. Thus, in French the feminine pronoun elles always designates an all-female group of people, but the masculine pronoun ils may refer to a group of males, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In English, this issue does not arise with pronouns, since there is only one plural third person pronoun, «they». However, a group of actors and actresses would still be described as a group of «actors». However, this is also because the word «actress» is falling out of use in English, while the word «actor,» like «doctor,» applies to thespians of both sexes.

In all these cases, one says that the feminine gender is semantically marked, while the masculine gender is unmarked. Sometimes, gender is expressed in more subtle ways.

Personal names are frequently constructed with language-specific affixes that identify the gender of the bearer. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are -a, of Latin or Romance origin (cf. Robert and Roberta) and -e, of French origin (cf. Justin and Justine).

Some Slavic languages, including Russian, Czech, and Slovak, make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders: according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic), by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphological), or through an arbitrary convention (lexical, possibly rooted in the language's history). Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.

Some loanwords are not the subject of the rules existing in the target language, e.g., ‘coffee’ in Russian is masculine regardless of the form (o-ending)

Sometimes the gender switches: Russian тополь (poplar) is now masculine, but less than 200 years ago (in writings of Lermontov) it was feminine.

Often, the masculine/feminine classification is only followed carefully for human beings. For animals, the relation between real and grammatical gender tends to be more arbitrary. In Spanish, for instance, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah), or una cebra macho (a male zebra). Different names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent for common pets or farm animals, e.g. English cow and bull, Spanish vaca «cow» and toro «bull». In Russian the relation between real and grammatical gender is not always prompted by the biological features when mentioning the animal class, but in case of need to identify the gender of an animal there are male or female opposites. (волк-волчица, коза-козел).

In English, it is common to refer to animals, especially house pets, for which the natural gender is known as “he” and “she”, accordingly, and to animals of unknown gender as “it”. Individual speakers may refer to animals of unknown sex by a gender, depending on species - for instance, some speakers may tend to refer to dogs as “he” and to cats as “she”. Animals are referred to as it if their sex is not important or not known; very often, however, they are referred to as he/him or she/her. Huddleston and Pullum describe the use of personal pronouns with animals in this way:

«Use of a masculine or feminine pronoun is generally more likely with pets, domestic animals, and creatures ranked high in the kingdom of wild animals (such as lions, tigers, elephants, etc.). It indicates a somewhat greater degree of interest in or empathy with the referent than does it....he or she is obligatory if the animal is referred to by a proper name».

As we see, the category of gender in English is inherently semantic, i.e. meaningful in so far as it reflects the actual features of the named objects. But the semantic nature of the category does not in the least make it into «non-grammatical», which follows from the whole content of what has been said in the present work.

There is a relationship between our language use and our social reality. Some Americans think that ‘Man’ is not generic anymore in Modern American English, but it tends to privilege males over females. Ideas of masculinity change across time, culture, and place. Think about the differences between what it meant «to be a man» in 17th-century France versus what it means «to be a man» today in the United States.

Proponents of gender-neutral language often point to the history of the word “man” to argue that, although the word once referred to both males and females, it no longer does so unambiguously. They argue that seemingly generic uses of the word “man” are often not in fact generic:

One author, ostensibly generalizing about all human beings, wrote:

“As for man, he is no different from the rest. His back aches, he ruptures easily, his women have difficulties in childbirth....”

Proponents of gender-neutral language argue that the use of gender-specific language often implies male superiority or reflects an unequal state of society. However, the use of the word “man” as a generic word referring to all humans has been declining, particularly among female speakers and writers. Many editing houses, corporations, and government bodies have official policies in favor of in-house use of gender-neutral language. In some cases, laws exist regarding the use of gender-neutral language in certain situations, such as job advertisements. In addition, gender-neutral language has gained support from some major textbook publishers. The advocates of gender-neutral language argue that language is rich in alternatives that speakers and writers, sensitive to attitudes and beliefs of audiences, can use gender-free means of communication. In some cases, gender-neutral language may be achieved through the use of gender-neutral words (“human being”, “person”, “individual”, and so on) instead of gender-specific ones (“man”, “woman”, “he”, “she”, “businessman”, “mother”, etc.), when speaking of people whose gender is unknown, ambiguous, or unimportant.

For these reasons, proponents of gender-neutral language claim that linguistic clarity as well as equality would be better served by having “man” refer unambiguously to males, and “human” to all persons.

The research has found that the use of generic masculine pronouns creates “male bias” by evoking a disproportionate number of male images and excluding thoughts of women in non-sex specific instances.

Proposed alternatives to the generic “he” include “he or she” (or “she or he”), “s/he”, or the use of “they” in the singular; each of these alternatives has met with objections. Some feel the use of the singular “they” sounds like a grammatical error, but according to some references, “they”, “their”, and “them” have long been grammatically acceptable as gender-neutral singular pronouns in English. Most style guides generally accept the singular “they” as grammatically correct, while others continue to reject it.

«It» (including «its» and «itself») is the most common and only third person, singular English gender-neutral pronoun; however, it is used only as a dummy pronoun in various impersonal constructions and to refer to abstractions, places, inanimate objects or materials, and non-human life of low order or unknown gender. The plural of «it» - «they» - is already used in all cases as a plural gender-neutral pronoun. The word «it», however, has an extremely impersonal connotation, even offensive, in common usage and is rarely used in English to refer to an unspecified human being or person of unknown gender. This is because the word «it» connotes that the person being specified is inferior to a person or is an object.

Some animals such as cattle and chickens have different words for male and female animals (bull and cow, rooster and hen, for example) and he and she are therefore used correspondingly. The gender of other animals such as rabbits, insects, etc. is not usually obvious and so these animals are usually referred some veterinarian or literary contexts. Alternatively, the use of “it” referring to an animal may imply that the speaker lacks or disdains emotional connection with the animal. In these cases, gender is quite dependent on meaning: it is a property of the referents and a marker of the person’s attitude to the animal.

Ships and smaller marine vessels are very often referred to in English with a «human» personal pronoun, but the pronoun is always she or her, never he or him. For example:

The Titanic sank on her/its maiden voyage

Other inanimate objects, such as wheeled vehicles, are referred to with either it or (sometimes) a feminine (not masculine) pronoun:

It/she is a beauty, this Ferrari

Countries are also referred to with she and her, but only when they do not denote a geographical entity. Thus we say

Canada is a parliamentary democracy. It has provinces, not states.

but

Canada is proud of her loyal sons and daughters

Infants and children are referred to with either the sex-neutral pronoun it or with the sex-based pronouns she/he and him/her, depending on the speaker's view or knowledge of the infant or child. Infants and children whose sex is not known or not relevant can be referred to as it; if the sex is known, the appropriate masculine (he, him) or feminine (she, her) pronoun is used.

Task 1. Make an agreement of the sentence parts.

A relative pronoun may be singular or plural depending on its antecedent. If the antecedent is plural, the relative pronoun is plural. If the antecedent is singular, the relative pronoun is singular.

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