dissertation grammatical gender

The resolution of natural and grammatical gender conflicts

Heloise ungless - linguistics.

My linguistics dissertation was on the topic of grammatical gender. Grammatical gender refers to the phenomenon of dividing nouns into two or more classes. It may seem odd to divide all nouns into such groups, but this is the case for over half the world’s languages (and used to be true of English).

In some languages the classes are based on properties such as whether the noun refers to humans, or whether they have spiritual connotations. In other words, the classes have some meaningful basis, and you can generally guess a noun’s class if you know what it refers to. In other languages, classification is largely not based on the meaning of the word but on its “form” – how it sounds, or how it was created (for example, if it was developed from an adjective, as with words like “happiness”). The classes will always have some meaningful differences between them, but largely words belong to a class by virtue of their form.  This is the case for French. In French, as in many European languages, the classes that the nouns belong to are known as “masculine” and “feminine” (some, such as German and Russian also have “neuter”). My dissertation focused on languages with masculine and feminine grammatical gender classes, in particular French.

Grammatical gender is reflected in agreement patterns on other elements: this is one of its defining properties.  In other words, if a noun belongs to gender A, then related verbs, articles (a/the), adjectives, etc may be modified to reflect this, having “gender A” agreement. Speakers of English will be familiar with agreement on verbs, for example with “the boy run s ” versus “I run”. The “ s ” on the verb marks that the subject “the boy” is third person, singular and that it is in the present tense. In languages such as Russian a verb might also have to mark that “the boy” is masculine.

Whilst it intuitively makes sense that the noun “boy” should belong to the masculine class, German would also include tables in that category. A table (ein Tisch) has no inherent properties that motivate it being masculine, and indeed the word is feminine in French. In my dissertation I referred to examples such as this as having “arbitrary grammatical gender”.

In French, “the boy” is also masculine – “le garçon” – but this is not the case for all nouns that refer to men. For example, the French word for revered religious leaders such as the Pope – “Sainteté” – is grammatically feminine, and there has never been a female in the role. This is an example of what I called “natural- grammatical gender conflict”, i.e. when the natural, meaningful gender of the person a noun refers to doesn’t match with the grammatical gender of the noun itself. Natural-grammatical gender conflicts were the main focus of my dissertation.

Many papers have been published which look at words like “Sainteté”, and how speakers decide which agreement forms to use: whether they opt for using arbitrary feminine agreement, or for meaningful masculine agreement. Certain patterns of speaker behaviour occur across languages. For example, the further removed from the noun the other element (that “carries” the agreement marker) is, the more likely speakers are to opt for using meaningful gender agreement. This “distance” effect is true both literally (ie relating to how “far apart” the noun and the other element is) and figuratively. To use a French example from a written corpus (aka a giant bank of actual language examples): “ Sa Sainteté est né sous le nom de Nazir Gayed”. This translates as “ his holiness was born under the name of Nazir Gayed”. Whilst the word “sa” (his) is modified to show agreement with the feminine noun, the past participle “né” (born) does not show feminine agreement, but rather masculine agreement, matching Nazir’s actual gender. Whilst “sa” and “né” are not very different with regards to distance from the noun, they are different types of word. “Sa” is known as an attributive word, and “né” a predicate. In French, predicates sometimes show meaningful agreement (as here), but attributives never do. Across speakers, across languages, across the world, people are more likely to use “meaningful” gender agreement on a predicate than an attributive, whatever their relative position. This probability difference can be represented in what is known as the “Agreement Hierarchy”, formulated by Greville Corbett. The hierarchy also includes relative pronouns, as in “who”, and personal pronouns, as in “he”. Personal pronouns are always the most likely to show “meaningful” gender agreement.

Attributive > Predicate > Relative Pronouns > Personal Pronouns

So, whilst this particular kind of natural-grammatical gender conflict had been much discussed, I focused on a related but very understudied phenomenon. I looked at examples where a spontaneously invented nickname had a different grammatical gender from the speaker’s own. I studied how people used agreement in these examples. The kind of “nickname” I studied involved metonymy. Metonymy means referring to something by some related property or item. A man might be referred to as “the blue suit”, for example, or a customer as “the full English”. In French, the existence of grammatical gender means that when using such “nicknames”, speakers must decide which gender to opt for with agreement: the person’s or the item’s.

I created a simple “complete the sentence” exercise to gather data on this phenomenon. I created two scenarios in which all the people involved were only women, or only men (plus two “distractor” scenarios so participants wouldn’t think gender was my focus, which might have interfered with their natural behaviour). After reading a scenario, my participants were presented with 6 sentence pairs. In the first sentence, a person was referred to using an item of clothing they were wearing. To give an English example, “the red dress is so bossy!”. Participants were asked to complete the following sentence, which was designed in such a way as to prompt them to use a pronoun to refer back to this person. I looked at examples where the item of clothing’s arbitrary grammatical gender did not match the person’s gender. For example, when a woman was referred to as “le pantalon gris” (the grey trousers), “trousers” being masculine in French. I found that speakers varied as to whether they used meaningful natural gender agreement or arbitrary grammatical gender agreement. This was true not only when comparing speakers, but also looking at an individual participant’s performance: people switched which kind of agreement they used, sentence to sentence, or scenario to scenario.

Whilst the conclusions I drew in my dissertation were of a highly theoretical nature, what is clear is that there is no set method by which speakers “resolve the conflict” between natural and grammatical gender, hence the variation. Elements near the noun are “biased” towards arbitrary grammatical gender, but pronouns (which are figuratively and usually literally further removed) are an active point of contention for native speakers of French!

Some further information on grammatical gender relating to my dissertation: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4175494?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Some studies looking at how grammatical gender can influence how we perceive an object: http://podbay.fm/show/500673866/e/1335760200?autostart=1 http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf

TECHNOLOGY REPORT article

A language index of grammatical gender dimensions to study the impact of grammatical gender on the way we perceive women and men.

• 1 Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland
• 2 Department for German Language and Literature, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
• 3 Institute of French Language and Literature, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
• 4 School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
• 5 Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
• 6 Institute for Psychology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany
• 7 Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany

Psycholinguistic investigations of the way readers and speakers perceive gender have shown several biases associated with how gender is linguistically realized in language. Although such variations across languages offer interesting grounds for legitimate cross-linguistic comparisons, pertinent characteristics of grammatical systems – especially in terms of their gender asymmetries – have to be clearly identified. In this paper, we present a language index for researchers interested in the effect of grammatical gender on the mental representations of women and men. Our index is based on five main language groups (i.e., grammatical gender languages, languages with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender, natural gender languages, genderless languages with few traces of grammatical gender and genderless languages) and three sets of specific features (morphology, masculine-male generics and asymmetries). Our index goes beyond existing ones in that it provides specific dimensions relevant to those interested in psychological and sociological impacts of language on the way we perceive women and men. We also offer a critical discussion of any endeavor to classify languages according to grammatical gender.

Introduction

The way we perceive women and men in society is partly grounded in the way we speak or write about these two groups. As such, language acts not only as a vehicle for beliefs, but also as a tool that builds them. For example, ordinary people, as well as the media, communicate gender-stereotypical expectations with regard to gender-appropriate behaviors and roles for women and men, and such communication might lead individuals to define themselves and behave in accord with these expectations (e.g., Hannover, 2002 ; Sczesny et al., 2018 ). Consequently, one can easily argue that language biases gender representations through its communicative functions. However, language contributes to biased gender representations in other ways, with its intrinsic characteristics creeping into the way we perceive women and men.

There are different ways that this can happen. For example, at a syntactic level, word order may signal to readers or listeners specific semantic and societal hierarchies (e.g., Hegarty et al., 2016 ; Kesebir, 2017 ). Referring to a woman and a man or to a man and a woman is not perceived as being the same, and the resulting biased representations – toward the first person mentioned – have been well documented ( Hegarty et al., 2016 ). Others have also documented biased uses of verbs and nouns when people refer to women or men. Typically, verbs denoting agency (i.e., more active) are more present in the immediate neighborhood of the word men [e.g., men (verb)] than the word women , and nouns and adjectives (i.e., more passive) more present in the immediate neighborhood of women (e.g., Formanowicz et al., 2017 ). These are some examples of the way language might constrain the way we think of women and men.

In this paper, however, we wish to concentrate on another characteristic feature of language that has kept psycholinguists particularly busy for the last two decades: grammatical gender. Most research on grammatical gender and gender representations has reflected the extent to which formal features of a language, such as the existence and number of grammatical gender categories (i.e., gender marking of pronouns, and/or nouns), may contribute to (biased) gender-related representations.

According to Dixon (1982) , a language possesses grammatical gender when the following three criteria are met: (1) all nouns in a language are grouped into classes, (2) there is grammatical agreement between nouns and their dependent words or elements (e.g., articles, adjectives, verbs), and (3) the class membership of nouns shows a considerable semantic correlation with sex. 1 This definition is more restricted than the one used by Corbett (1991) in his seminal book on gender, which did not include the third criterion. Dixon’s definition, which includes the sex dimension, appears to be more suitable for psycholinguistics research interests, because this research is often concerned with questions of gender-fairness, linguistic reference to and mental representations of women and men (for reviews see Stahlberg et al., 2007 ; Gabriel and Gygax, 2016 ; Sato et al., 2017 ; Gabriel et al., 2018 ). Sex-based grammatical gender systems are common in Indo-European languages, yet the reasons why these systems have emerged are not clear ( Corbett, 1991 ; Foundalis, 2002 ).

Although grammatical gender systems vary between languages – and this paper presents an index of some important differences lacking from previous indexes – they also share some characteristics that have been shown to greatly affect readers’ and speakers’ mental representations of women and men. An example of a characteristic commonly shared across languages (English, French, German, etc.) is the multiple meanings of the masculine form, used when referring to animate beings. In these gendered (e.g., French, German) and semi-gendered languages (e.g., English, for which this feature only applies to pronouns nowadays), the masculine form tends to be used either specifically – referring exclusively to men – or in a so-called generic way – when there are female and male referents, or when the gender of referents is unknown or irrelevant. Interestingly, the dual meaning of masculine forms is often grounded in historical androcentric (and sexist) pressures ( Gabriel et al., 2018 ). For example, in English, the singular and non-gendered they , used for several centuries in English literature, met with fierce criticism by 19th century androcentric prescriptive grammarians, who – following an earlier drive to impose the sex-indefinite he – saw the masculine form as the worthier one ( Bodine, 1975 ). In French, in the 17th century, grammarians deemed it important to establish the masculine form as the dominant one, as they felt that men were simply nobler than women ( Viennot, 2014 ). Until the 17th century, it was not uncommon to refer to a group composed of women and men by using pair-forms, meaning both female and male versions [e.g., les auteurs et autrices … (male and female authors)]. In German, masculine nouns have been promoted as having the ability to refer generically to both sexes only from the beginning of the 20th century ( Doleschal, 2002 : 59). Formerly, women and men – namely feminine and masculine forms referring to them – had been treated separately by grammatical description, and masculine forms were not described as having both a specific and a generic meaning ( Doleschal, 2002 ). Thus, in all the languages with grammatical gender that we discuss in our database, there is a potential bias in favor of the masculine forms. Note that – although they would constitute interesting languages to compare to – we are not aware of any European language with a similar potential feminine bias.

Psycholinguistic investigations of how readers derive gender from the masculine form mostly show that its alleged generic meaning is rather difficult to activate (e.g., Gygax et al., 2012 ). For example, in a series of experiments in French, Gygax et al. (2012) showed that people have trouble considering a person described with a female kinship term (e.g., a sister) as belonging to a group of people when the group was referred to with the masculine form (e.g., musiciens n.m. “musicians”). This effect was also present when participants were explicitly asked to consider the masculine form as a generic one. In a recent cross-linguistic study in German and Italian, Horvath et al. (2016) also showed that the use of the masculine form only (as opposed to the use of both feminine and masculine words) generated representations that were more strongly male (i.e., a higher percentage of men in a profession).

Others have also looked at lexical access of gendered nouns, in comprehension and production. Among them, some have examined different asymmetries between the masculine and the feminine forms (e.g., Beatty-Martínez and Dussias, 2019 ), whilst others have examined the underlying routes (e.g., form-related or lexically based routes) to access grammatical gender in speech production (see Wang and Schiller, 2019 for a review). Still, whether explicitly or implicitly, most studies on individual grammatical gender languages suggest that their findings are generalizable to other languages with similar grammatical features. Several cross-linguistic comparison studies have demonstrated this generalizability (see Esaulova and von Stockhausen, 2015 , or Gygax et al., 2008 ). Some studies have also suggested that languages bearing different grammatical gender features may display differences in the ways that speakers of these languages mentally represent the world in terms of gender (see Sato et al., 2013 , for a comparison of French and English). Some authors have interpreted these differences as being illustrative of the impact of language on thought (e.g., Sato et al., 2016 ), in line with Slobin’s (2003) Thinking for Speaking hypothesis, for example.

However, most cross-linguistic comparisons of grammatical gender effects on mental representations have documented interesting variations. Yet, the grammatical gender systems under investigation are not always described in detail, at least in terms of similarities and differences, and existing indexes do not always provide the adequate dimensions to do so (especially when the focus resides in the way women and men are perceived). Cross-linguistic comparisons will remain useful for documenting the effect of language on thought (and on social constructs), but a more fine-grained analysis of the grammatical gender systems under investigation is required. Most studies on the topic have concentrated on existing taxonomies (e.g., Corbett, 1991 ; the Gender across Languages Project: Hellinger and Bußmann, 2001-2003 ; Hellinger and Motschenbacher, 2015 ; Fedden et al., 2018 for non-canonical gender systems), although some characteristics of grammatical gender systems, such as those presented in this paper, may be more relevant for future psycholinguistic investigations.

In the present paper, we present a non-exhaustive index of 15 grammatical gender systems (i.e., Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Rumanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swiss German), based on work that has been already conducted (or could easily be conducted) and on dimensions that we identified as relevant for psycholinguistic research. In accordance with our goal to provide data for research on gender biases, our index focuses only on gender-related information and does not document other differences between these systems. We first present the dimensions chosen, along with their justifications, as well as a comprehensive table (see Supplementary Table S1 ) on the language samples. The list of languages chosen is obviously not exhaustive, and we do hope that additional languages will be categorized using our classification system.

The Language Index of Grammatical Gender Dimensions

When establishing the data for the Language Index of Grammatical Gender dimensions , we followed an a priori grouping of several gender system types based on features that are known for a broad range of languages. We excluded universal features such as the existence of lexical gender words (e.g., woman , father , male , female ) or the possibility of combining lexical gender elements with other nouns (as in English girlfriend , male teacher ). Such forms appear to exist in most languages and therefore do not help to differentiate between languages. Importantly, our index not only complements existing taxonomies of grammatical gender (e.g., Dixon, 1982 ; Corbett, 1991 ) – and therefore helps to classify languages according to grammatical gender –, but also offers new insights into particular language biases (often toward favoring masculine forms) that may be of particular interest to those examining the psychological and sociological impacts of language on the way we perceive women and men. As such, and to the best of our knowledge, we offer a new taxonomic perspective on grammatical gender.

For the purpose of the present paper, we identified five different language groups, based on previous gender system descriptions (e.g., Corbett, 1991 ; Hellinger and Bußmann, 2001-2003 ; Hellinger and Motschenbacher, 2015 ). Even though languages in the first and second groups are very similar in many respects, we present them as two distinct groups, as only languages in the first group make a systematic distinction for human nouns between masculine and feminine forms. This distinction is highly relevant for research of the way gender distinction affects our representation of women and men.

1. Grammatical gender languages (e.g., French, Spanish, Czech, German) are languages in which personal (i.e., human) nouns (French l’enseignant , l’enseignante “the teacher”, le fils , la fille “the son,” “the daughter”) as well as inanimate nouns (Spanish la mesa n.f. “the table,” el despacho n.m. “the desk”) are classified for gender. These nouns control agreement of various other lexical categories such as determiners, adjectives or pronouns. Gender assignment is mostly semantically arbitrary for inanimate nouns, whereas the grammatical gender of human nouns shows considerable correspondence with the sex of the referent (or gender identity; see note #2). However, in some cases, the grammatical gender of nouns denoting human referents is different from their lexical gender (German das Mädchen n.n. “the girl,” Czech to děvče n.n. “this girl”). In such cases, one can observe agreement according to grammatical gender (especially when the satellite elements are close to the noun) as well as agreement according to the to the gender of the referent (when such elements are more distant) (ex. German Das Mädchen n.n., das pron.n. ich kennengelernt habe, heisst Eva. Es pron.n./Sie pron.f. ist aus Deutschland. , “The girl that I’ve met is called Eva. She is from Germany.”). In other cases, nouns denoting humans may be used to refer to women and men (French la personne n.f. “the person,” l’individu n.m. “the individual”). The number of such hybrid names varies across languages (see Corbett, 2015 , for a detailed account of hybrid nouns). Such examples should be avoided in experiments testing grammatical gender because they represent exceptions with respect to the functioning of gender systems.

2. Languages with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender (e.g., Norwegian, Dutch) have grammatical gender distinctions for inanimate nouns as well as for some personal nouns. In such cases, gender generally relates to the sex or gender identity of the referents. Contrary to languages such as German, Italian or French, where human nouns are often differentiated between masculine and feminine forms, the majority of human nouns are not formally distinguished between masculine and feminine forms. They can therefore be used for female and male referents without being linguistically differentiated. In this respect, these languages are closer to natural gender languages like English. For example, these languages have nouns equivalent to the English teacher , doctor , neighbor , etc., that are not formally marked for gender. Pronouns usually express the sex of the referent or the gender identity of a human referent.

3. Natural gender languages (e.g., English) don’t classify inanimate nouns according to different genders. Most personal nouns behave similarly, meaning that they are not specified for sex or gender identity (e.g., teacher, child, politician ). Personal pronouns distinguish between female and male forms, which are used to refer to male or female referents, according to their referential sex or gender identity (e.g., my teacher – she , your teacher – he ).

4. Genderless languages with a few traces of grammatical gender (e.g., Oriya, Basque) most personal nouns (in words equivalent to teacher , child , politician in English) as well as personal pronouns are used for male or female referents without using distinct linguistic forms. A few gendered forms appear in nouns with gender suffixes or gendered adjective or verbal forms.

5. Genderless languages (e.g., Turkish and Finnish) are languages where most human nouns as well as pronouns are generally unspecified for gender. If there are distinctions in personal pronouns, they refer to other features than femaleness and maleness (e.g., Finnish hän “she/he” = human, animate vs. se “it” = inanimate). The structure of these languages therefore does not enforce the use of gender-marked forms, even though this information can be conveyed by lexical means, such as the Turkish erkek “man or male” or kız “girl.” Gender-suffixes may occur on human nouns: for example, the suffix -tar or -tär may be added in Finnish to some words (mostly professions) to create feminine forms (e.g., näyttelijä “actor,” näyttelijätär “actress”). However, they are no longer used to create new forms.

In Section 1 of our table (see Supplementary Table S1 ) languages have been classified according to these five groups. When reading the table, it is important to bear in mind that in Section 1, only the fields that are relevant, depending on the category to which a language belongs, have been filled. Linguistic descriptions for the other subgroups of languages are marked as “not applicable.”

The next three sets of features – described in Sections 2 to 4 of the Table – are common to all languages and therefore always filled in (see Supplementary Table S1 ). They pertain to various aspects of linguistic structures, the lexicon and language use, 2 and have not been described in detail in previous taxonomies, specifically:

Morphology (esp. derivation): What (classes of) words (esp. personal nouns and personal names) have formal features that can be attributed to (and may be interpreted in the light of) genders or gender identities? Which derivational processes are relevant and where may one find negative connotations attached to certain forms? In a language such as French, some feminine/female forms (names as well as nouns) are morphologically derived from masculine/male (e.g., poète n.m. > poétesse n.f., “poet”), alongside structurally symmetric pairs of feminine/female and masculine/male forms (e.g., directeur n.m., directrice n.f. “director”) or common gender forms like extrémiste n.f. and n.m., “extremist”). Some of the derived feminine forms may carry a negative connotation (such as the suffix - ette in gendarmette n.f. “female police officer.”

Masculine-male generics: Which masculine word forms are not used specifically to refer to male referents, but may be used with the intention to generically refer to (groups of) individuals whose referential/biological gender is irrelevant or unknown? In French, generically used forms are found both in nominal forms (e.g., lecteurs n.m. pl., “readers”) as well as in agreement targets such as determiners ( le det.m., “the”), pronouns ( chacun pron.m., “each”) or adjectives ( intéressé adj.m., “interested”).

Asymmetries: What types of asymmetric forms or semantic features can be observed in the lexicon? For example, address terms may not be symmetrical between women and men (e.g., in English, the potentially sexist distinction between Mrs and Miss for women, while only one form, Mr ., exists for men). Certain feminine/female (or masculine/male) counterpart forms for certain types of designations (e.g., occupational titles) may be absent from the lexicon (e.g., in French the lack of corresponding forms for médecin n.m., “medical doctor” or sage-femme n.f., “midwife.” Other asymmetries, for example, can be found in morphology, semantic connotations related to masculine feminine equivalent forms, or in various types of derogatory meanings attached to certain forms.

Note that in some cases more fine-grained distinctions based on usage have not been exhaustively documented in the table (see Supplementary Table S1 ) for practical reasons. For example, a given form may exist, but its usage may be infrequent or fading. We still qualify it as present but urge that researchers interested in these particular features should always carefully control for its usage. For each feature, the following classification has been used:

– Present: a given feature is obligatory or very common in the language.

– Partially present: there are examples of this feature in the language, but they are exceptions, rather than rules.

– Absent: the feature does not appear in the language. Note that this tag was only used in reference to usage in Sections 2–4. When cells in the table concern other groups of languages in Section 1, these are filled in with the indication not applicable .

Psycholinguistic investigations of the way people perceive gender have shown different biases associated with the particulars of grammatical gender. Not surprisingly, since many languages possess grammatical gender, these investigations have been conducted across a wide range of languages. However, between language comparisons – as rich as they may be – face intrinsic questions of legitimate comparability. In the present language index, we present different grammatical gender dimensions that might be of special interest for those interested in cross-languages comparisons in the way grammatical gender constrains our mental representations of women and men.

However, constructing a language index raises some important issues that also need to be taken into consideration in order to document how grammatical gender is encoded across languages. While the classification of languages into one of the five main categories that we established (genderless, natural gender, etc.) is globally straightforward, even though some intermediate cases may arise, many issues arise for the more specific questions that are raised for all languages in Sections 2 to 4 of our index. One such issue is the necessity to determine whether some features are truly productive in a language. This question can hardly be answered based on the intuitions of native-speaking informants alone, as it requires the use of quantitative analyses. This implies that for every feature in every language, a correct estimation of its prevalence would require extensive studies of language use in corpus data. Conducting such empirical analyses is beyond the scope of our index. While conscious of the limitations of our approach, we had to content ourselves with an estimation of usage provided by native speaker informants that we divided into three intuitive categories (i.e., no examples, only a few examples come to mind, many examples). These categories provide an estimation that should therefore be treated with caution, and are best used as a starting point for researchers who are interested in one particular aspect of gender differences.

Another limitation of our index is that the usage of feminine forms has evolved over the past decades in many languages. As a result, many forms that are attested may now be falling out of use. For example, the use of the word le minister to designate a female (government) minister in French is now declining, following an official decision from the French government in 1997 to feminize occupation names for women ( Cerquiglini, 2018 ). Thus, even though some naming practices might be recognized by informants as existing in their language, it does not mean that they still correspond to current practices, or would not be recognized as sexist by its speakers. Here again, extensive studies of languages use that go well beyond the scope of our index would be needed to determine the nature of current practices.

Yet again, we believe that our index represents a useful starting point for researchers who want to investigate these questions. Another issue is that naming practices often vary from country to country, even when those countries share the same language. French is a case in point. While in France, the feminization of occupation names for women is a recent phenomenon, the use of feminine names was already current practice decades earlier in other French-speaking countries such as Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland.

Finally, our index contains a sample of 15 languages, representing mostly the Indo-European family. However, grammatical gender distinctions are widespread across the languages of the world. According to a recent typological sample, they occur in 40% of the world’s languages ( Corbett, 2013a ). From those, 75% have a gender distinction based on sex ( Corbett, 2013b ). Adding languages from other families that fall into this category would therefore bring valuable enrichments to our index, allowing us to move beyond Western cultural representations of sex and gender, as cultural differences have an impact of the representation of gender. For example, Corbett (2013b) reports that in Lak, a language spoken in the central Dagestan highlands, girls were not classified within the category of rational females, which for example applied to grown-up women, but in the category of other (non-male and non-female) animate beings. This classification led to an evolution of usage concerning the terms of address for young women. Using the gender marking for animate but not females when addressing young women became a sign of politeness. Aside from such anecdotal examples, documentation of gender-related usage for these languages is to a large extent lacking. We hope, however, to be able to enrich the present database in the future with more publications on languages for which gender-related usage can be collected.

Author Contributions

PG prepared the first draft of the manuscript and coordinated the work among all authors. DE and SZ completed the index and collected the final data for it. AG worked on the final draft of the manuscript. SS and LvS initiated the project within the ITN Marie Curie framework. FB, JO, and AG created the first version of the index and organised the collection of the initial data for the languages presented in the Supplementary Material . All authors worked on their specific language to complete the index.

The research leading to this language index has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 237907.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Claudia Berger, Maria Josep Cuenca, Carsten Elbro, Yulia Esaulova, Jessica Franzoni, Jet Hoek, Mateusz Maselko, Zhanna Meland, Olga Nagel, Silvia Natale, Anton Oettl, Michal Parzuchowski, Martin Pleško, and Andrei Popescu-Belis for their invaluable inputs on our table.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01604/full#supplementary-material

• ^ By the use of the term sex here, we refer to the normative category of women and men . In the following text, we will use the terms sex or gender identity for women and men referents.
• ^ Note that although we evaluate these features as pertaining or not to different languages in the table (see Supplementary Table S1 , for a.xlsm version with macro for improving exploration of the table, see https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/zFSUSxtgIID56Ch ), we focus on the French language merely to illustrate them here.

Beatty-Martínez, A. L., and Dussias, P. E. (2019). Revisiting masculine and feminine grammatical gender in spanish: linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic evidence. Front. Psychol. 10:751. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00751

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Keywords : grammatical gender, gender representation, index, typology, language comparison

Citation: Gygax PM, Elmiger D, Zufferey S, Garnham A, Sczesny S, von Stockhausen L, Braun F and Oakhill J (2019) A Language Index of Grammatical Gender Dimensions to Study the Impact of Grammatical Gender on the Way We Perceive Women and Men. Front. Psychol. 10:1604. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01604

Received: 11 January 2019; Accepted: 26 June 2019; Published: 10 July 2019.

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Copyright © 2019 Gygax, Elmiger, Zufferey, Garnham, Sczesny, von Stockhausen, Braun and Oakhill. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Pascal Mark Gygax, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I: General issues and specific studies

The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia.

This volume is complemented by volume two , which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.

• Introduction Francesca Di Garbo, Bruno Olsson, Bernhard Wälchli Chapter 1
• Canonical, complex, complicated? Jenny Audring Chapter 2
• Gender: esoteric or exoteric? Östen Dahl Chapter 3
• Why is gender so complex? Some typological considerations Johanna Nichols Chapter 4
• Niger-Congo “noun classes” conflate gender with deriflection Tom Güldemann, Ines Fiedler Chapter 5
• Gender in Uduk Don Killian Chapter 6
• Gender in Walman Matthew S. Dryer Chapter 7
• The gender system of Coastal Marind Bruno Olsson Chapter 8
• Gender in New Guinea Erik Svärd Chapter 9
• Gender typology and gender (in)stability in Hindu Kush Indo-Aryan languages Henrik Liljegren Chapter 10

Biographies

Francesca Di Garbo is a postdoctoral research fellow in General Linguistics at Stockholm University. She received a BA in Classics (2005) and an MA in Classical Philology and Historical Linguistics (2007) at the University of Palermo (Italy). In 2014, she received her PhD in Linguistics at Stockholm University (Sweden). Her doctoral dissertation is a typological investigation of gender and its interaction with number and evaluative morphology in the languages of Africa. Her publications include papers on: the typology of interactions between gender and number, and gender and evaluative morphology; the encoding of evaluative morphology and temperature evaluation in the Kwa language Selee, spoken in Ghana; linguistic complexity, with focus on grammatical gender and the relationship between language structures and social structures. She has taught at Stockholm University and the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include the synchronic and diachronic typology of nominal classification systems and number systems, evaluative morphology, African languages, linguistic complexity, and the relationship between language structure and the socio-historical and natural environment.

Bruno Olsson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian National University. After completing an MA thesis on iamitive tense/aspect markers in Southeast Asian languages at Stockholm University (2013), Bruno pursued doctoral studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, resulting in a description of the Coastal Marind language of New Guinea (2017). His current work includes descriptive and historical work on other languages of the Anim family, with emphasis on the Yaqay language and the development of the Anim gender systems. Some of his other research interests are morphosyntax, the semantics of tense-aspect categories, the typology of Papuan languages, and Kashaya (a language of Northern California).

Bernhard Wälchli is professor in General Linguistics at Stockholm University. He received his master’s degree in Slavic and Baltic studies at the University of Bern (Switzerland) in 1997 and his Ph.D. in General Linguistics at Stockholm University (Sweden) in 2003. His publications include the monograph Co-compounds and natural coordination published by Oxford University Press, in the series "Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory", and he is a co-editor of several collections of articles and theme issues on typology, areal linguistics and grammaticalization, aggregation of features extracted from texts, parallel texts, and methodology in linguistics. His recent publications include work on the typology of motion events, morphological typology, word formation, measuring the similarity of languages, ideophones, logophoricity, and perception verbs. His major current research interests are the typology of gender, temporal clauses, tense and aspect, negation, Baltic linguistics, and the Mek languages in New Guinea. His earlier work on grammatical gender consists of case studies on the rise and decline of gender systems (The Mek language Nalca and Northwestern Latvian dialects).

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The semantics of grammatical gender: A cross-cultural study

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• Volume 22 , pages 519–534, ( 1993 )

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Although most present-day scholars claim that grammatical gender has no meaning correlates, anecdotal evidence dating back to the Greeks suggests that grammatical gender carries connotative meanings of femininity and masculinity. In the present study native German speakers (tested in Germany) and native Spanish speakers (tested in Mexico) judged 54 high-frequency translation equivalents on semantic differential scales chosen to reflect dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activity. Half the words were of feminine gender in German but of masculine gender in Spanish (Type I words), and half were of masculine gender in German and of feminine gender in Spanish (Type II words). As predicted, German speakers judged Type II words higher in potency than Type I words, whereas Spanish speakers judged Type I words higher in potency than Type II words. The conclusion was that grammatical gender does affect meaning.

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The research reported is based on a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the Ph.D. in psychology at UCLA. I am grateful to Ingrid Hudabiunigg for collecting the German data and to Olga Bustos-Romero for collecting the Spanish data. My sincere thanks to my dissertation committee, Donald MacKay, Nancy Henley, Roger Andersen, Raimo Anttila, Patricia Greenfield, and William McCarthy for their advice and assistance. Donald MacKay and Nancy Henley also provided helpful comments on the present manuscript.

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Konishi, T. The semantics of grammatical gender: A cross-cultural study. J Psycholinguist Res 22 , 519–534 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01068252

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Pronouns and Gender in Language

Department of Linguistics, University of Washington

• Published: 02 September 2020
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Pronouns are a grammatical element that take the place of full noun phrases, and in many of the world’s languages, pronouns also convey social information such as the gender of a referent. This chapter surveys the literature on the linguistics of pronouns from a broad array of disciplinary perspectives, focusing on the way social categories of gender interact with linguistic factors. The first section reviews gendered pronouns through the lens of performativity and speech act theory, discussing how pronouns and misgendering can be used for impoliteness and politeness. The second section surveys some semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic analyses of pronouns, including debates on the semantic and syntactic category of pronouns in the grammar. While the bulk of this chapter focuses on gendered pronouns in English, the third section provides a cross-linguistic perspective of gendered pronouns and inflectional morphology, and more interactional data is discussed.

Introduction

Pronouns are functional elements of language used to replace (or serve the function of) larger phrases. Pro nouns do not necessarily replace nouns , but rather the entire linguistic unit associated with a noun. In formal syntactic theories, pronouns are taken to replace a whole noun phrase.

Pronouns are of interest to scholars of gender and language because for many languages, the form of a pronoun depends on the gender of the person it refers to (or the gender of the speaker or listener). Unlike gendered nouns or other gendered language, however, pronouns are functional elements—meaning they are resistant to change, and it is unusual for languages to develop new pronouns over short periods of time (Muysken 2008 ). The gender of pronouns can also depend on grammatical gender, which can lead to confusion or conflation—for example, in German the noun das Mädchen (“girl”) has a neuter grammatical gender, meaning that German speakers can use the pronoun es to refer to a girl if they have previously used das Mädchen (Corbett 2006 ). The complications between grammatical gender of nouns and the social gender of referents can lead to points where different forms of pronouns may be used in variation.

Pronouns can do some jobs that normal noun phrases cannot do as well. In addition to referring to a particular entity, pronouns can have a variable meaning dependent on another element of the sentence or conversation. Example (1) shows a pronoun in English being used to refer to an entity; example (2) shows a pronoun used to convey variable meaning constrained by everyone .

(1) Jared i is Canadian. He i lives in Ottowa. (2) Everyone i should respect his i mother.

The use in (2) is an epicene pronoun; in English, there is a long history of debate about the most appropriate epicene form to use. Here, the pronoun his suggests (to many English speakers) that we are only discussing males; an alternative, in example (3), is gender neutral but argued by some prescriptive grammarians to constitute a mismatch between singular everyone and (apparently) plural their .

(3) Everyone i should respect their i mother.

The use of pronouns for both specific and for generic reference is heavily tied to the social categories that pronouns encode. This chapter reviews discussions of pronouns and gender from several different perspectives in the field of linguistics. In the first section I discuss how epicene and gender-neutral pronouns fit into a larger picture of a theory of gender performativity and speech-act theory, as well as examine how pronouns and misgendering can be analyzed through theories of linguistic im/politeness. The second section surveys the formal syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analyses of pronouns (gendered and otherwise). The third section introduces interactional views of pronoun use, and incorporates insights from cross-linguistic innovations in gender-neutral and nonbinary language.

The Problem of Gendered Pronouns: Performativity, Misgendering, and Politeness

As with any form of language that introduces information about gender or sex into a conversation, pronouns have been the focus of discussions of implicit sexism and bias in language. Epicene or generic uses of he have been the focus of many such discussions in English. Anne Curzan ( 2003 ) traces indefinite uses of he and they (singular) as far back as the 15th century; for several hundred years, these forms co-existed in apparently free variation, meaning that writers used either he or they (or other forms like he or she ) variously when referring to singular indefinite gender-neutral antecedents like anyone . In the 18th century and onward, a trend emerged in prescriptive grammars of English forbidding the use of they in these contexts, suggesting instead that he was sufficiently generic. Some of these grammars explicitly advocated for he due to a hierarchy of the sexes (like Harvey in 1878), others based their arguments purely in terms of number agreement (as did Brown in 1828), and others (such as Hooks and Mathews in 1956) simply acknowledge that generic singular they is common in colloquial English but inappropriate for formal writing (Curzan 2003 ; Newman 1997 ). The prescriptive grammarian commentary from the 18th and 19th centuries was therefore an attempt to reign in already-existing variation, rather than to replace one settled form with another. (See Hernandez 2020 for more on the relationship between prescriptivism and nonbinary and transgender identities.)

Descriptive linguists in the 20th century sought to question assertions that he was truly generic when used indefinitely. Studies that asked participants to “fill in the blank” using pronouns to describe generic indefinite terms (like a teacher , a student , or anyone ) showed that pronoun use was influenced by real-world gender stereotypes, meaning that he was not a one-size-fits-all pronoun (Hughes and Casey 1986 ; Hyde 1984 ). Other studies tested the opposite direction: when given a prompt that included a pronoun, experimenters tested whether pronouns like he or they had different impacts on what sort of gender the participants imagined. These studies also found that he was not reliably gender-neutral when compared with he or she or they (Moulton, Robinson, and Elias 1978 ; Hyde 1984 ; Gastil 1990 ).

Work in the 20th and 21st centuries by feminist scholars and linguists has framed the (prescribed-for) use of generic he as a reflection of (perhaps unconscious) sexism (Moulton et al. 1978 ; Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips 2003 ; Prewitt-Freilino, Caswell, and Laakso 2012 ). They argue that using he to encompass antecedents that “should” be gender-neutral instills the sexist assumption in English speakers that women constitute a marked gender, compared to men who exist as a default gender. The experimental examinations of generic pronouns support the assertion that he does in fact suggest male (not gender-neutral) mental images to the reader/hearer, which further contributes to the misogynist convention where women are excluded from discussions of people in general (unless specified otherwise).

One difficulty of studying pronouns from a linguistic perspective is that, although they are grammatical elements, they are also related to social relations between people. Thus, when a speaker is calculating what pronoun to use about someone, part of that calculation is necessarily social and relational. While some languages (like Thai, Japanese, or many Romance languages) have an obvious connection between pronominal form and social relation, English is tricky because the social relation being indicated is gender. Most linguistics literature, until quite recently, describes gender marking in Modern English as reflecting “natural sex”— a concept not often critiqued by linguists (for an important exception, see McConnell-Ginet 2014 ). When earlier work (even by feminist and progressive authors) describes the English pronominal system, little attention is paid to the arbitrary or discursively constructed nature of the “natural sex” categories themselves (Curzan 2003 , for example, discusses singular they extensively yet never discusses the possibility of referring to genderqueer referents, outside of a single footnote).

When linguists have disambiguated sex and gender, they have often still relied on fallacies of pre-discursive, inherent, binary sex categories. 1 As linguists move toward a view of sex and gender more compatible with performative theories (Butler 2013 ), it is becoming more clear that embodied sex characteristics are only one among several factors that control gender morphology—gender identity, gender relations, and other factors are clearly equally important. Lauren Ackerman ( 2019 ) provides a thorough framework for understanding these factors; for the purposes of this chapter, I use sex to refer to a system of categorizing bodies, and gender to refer to a system of social organization.

With these terms in mind, it is important to clarify whether English pronouns (or any type of grammatical marking of this type) depend more on sex or on gender. One way to triangulate whether something is predicated on sex or gender is to examine instances in which peoples’ gender (presentation, identity, social positioning) does not align with their sex (assignment at birth based on interpretation of infant bodies). The other way to figure out that the notion in question is in fact gender (and not sex) is to look at uses of pronouns that are inexplicable otherwise. Sally McConnell-Ginet ( 2014 ; see also this volume) raises some problems with attributing pronominal form to sex by highlighting a few conflicts: the oft-cited phenomenon of using she to refer to ocean vessels, usually attributed to gender ideology, and the use of gender agreement by hijras speaking Hindi. She cites Kira Hall ( 2003 ) here: the Hijra identity, which is a long-standing gender identity in India that does not map neatly into western ideas of male and female, is at least partially constructed using gender morphology—including expressive shifts within a single conversation. What McConnell-Ginet proposes as an alternative to “natural” gender is instead notional gender, which encodes not a clear-cut biological distinction but instead the socioculturally constructed groups of men, women, and those who are neither. McConnell-Ginet applies her use of notional gender to alternations that we see in English, including expressive uses (such as the use of she among groups of gay men), presumptive leaps (in which a speaker uses he or she to refer to a referent of unknown gender, often informed by stereotypes or gender ideology), and misgendering (in which a speaker may intentionally or unconsciously use the “wrong” pronoun for affective reasons).

With this analysis, McConnell-Ginet extends her earlier observations about English pronouns (McConnell-Ginet 1979 ), wherein she expounds instances in which he, she , he or she , and they can be variably used to refer to either hypothetical or actual people. In that work, she concludes that the use of he and she predominate (at the time of writing) primarily due to the psychological conception of gender categories: “Pronouns can refer to real people or fictive prototypes. So long as most of us believe that women and men are what really exist, that androgynes are simply abstract entities, we will tend to sexualize our prototypes as we personalize them” (McConnell-Ginet 1979 : 80). In a later section on singular they , I show how McConnell-Ginet’s observation that the use of binary gendered pronouns depends on a conception of binary gendered categories seems to be borne out: as attitudes about gender and transgenderism change, so does the use of pronouns.

Many dominant assumptions in the linguistic study of gender and pronouns are lately being challenged, due in part to the increased visibility and participation of transgender people in the field of linguistics. In instances in which pronouns (or any “natural” gendered language) are said to refer to the “sex” of a referent, this assumes that the “sex” of any given person is obvious from their appearance, does not change over the course of their lifespan, and is in a stable, parallel relationship with their social gender. None of these assumptions hold, however, when accounting for transgender referents. Additionally, transgender people are particularly prone to misgendering, due either to a conflict in the understanding of what constitutes their gender (between the referent and the speaker) or due to a conflict in the understanding of what constitutes gender in general.

In her theory of performativity, Judith Butler ( 2013 ) builds on the work of J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory to inscribe a socially generative power into speech acts: not only do words “reflect” (or refer to) reality, but words and speech acts are in part responsible for the formation of the social and metaphysical world in which individuals exist (Austin 1975 ; see also Milani, this volume). As it pertains to gender, Butler’s performativity is a way of inverting the causal relationship between gendered life experiences and gendered language/speech acts. Thus, the speech acts that we use to describe, differentiate, claim, and identify bodies are part of the social practice of how we create sexed categories and, at another level of abstraction, gendered subjects. Language is a social practice, so language is how we come to social consensus about categories and membership therein.

When looking at gender and its instantiation in pronouns, it is therefore instructive to think of (third person, referential) pronouns as part of the way that a collective society decides and creates the social gender of an individual referent. It follows, then, that misgendering is a kind of speech act that effects a feeling (in either the referent or others) of discontinuity, fragmentation, or conflict. This conflict occurs primarily when the linguistic practices creating social gender fail to align with a person’s internal sense of self or identity. For this reason, misgendering may be viewed as a form of impoliteness. Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson ( 1987 ) outline positive face as an individual’s social need to be well-thought-of, or to maintain a positive consistent self-image; and negative face as an individual’s need to be free from obligations and impositions upon their will. Their theory of politeness is set up as a cooperative system in which all participants should, in general, endeavor to serve the needs of both their own and their interlocutor’s positive and negative face It is assumed that it is generally beneficial to an individual to satisfy a conversational partner’s desires, but not required to serve all desires of a conversational partner. This builds on Erving Goffman’s ( 1967 ) conception of politeness in terms of face. What is important to both theories of politeness is that a conception of the self of a speaker is mediated through discourse and is relational. Choosing a gendered (third person) pronoun is therefore subject to (at least) two constraints:

(4) Failing to attribute a person’s gender to them is an imposition on their positive face. (5) Asserting an incorrect gender for a person is an imposition on their positive face.

For speakers who rank (4) higher than (5), they are more likely to “guess” at a pronoun—even if they are not sure; for speakers who rank (5) higher than (4), they are more likely to avoid pronouns or use gender-neutral pronouns.

Additionally, speakers can deliberately be impolite to each other. Work on im politeness also provides a model for understanding misgendering; as an example, Jonathon Culpepper suggests that intentional threats to the positive face needs of an interlocutor may be used to convey impoliteness, specifically giving the example of inappropriate forms of address (1996: 357). Thus, violating either (4) or (5) provides a method for speakers to show aggression or dislike through linguistic impoliteness, which is an available force for speakers to convey negative social meaning. Crucially, obeying or failing to obey either (4) or (5) may be an attempt at politeness or impoliteness depending on context. Culpepper and others (e.g., Leech 1983 ; Fraser and Nolan 1981 ) note that politeness and impoliteness are predominantly contextually determined, and very few acts are inherently impolite.

This section has presented background in the theory on gender performativity, social relationships, and politeness theory in linguistics as they pertain especially to the use of pronouns and gender features. The next section turns toward formal theories of linguistics; my overview of the syntax and semantics literature is intended to give interdisciplinary perspective on the great breadth of research that has been done on pronouns and gender in grammar.

Pronouns in Semantic, Syntactic, and Pragmatic Perspective

This section is split into three subparts, focusing first on formal semantic analyses of gender and pronouns, then on formal syntactic analyses; the final subsection on pragmatics includes proposals intended to incorporate pragmatic concerns into the grammar proper, as part of the generative project in linguistics.

Semantics: Referential Pronouns

In their most well-known use, pronouns refer directly to entities in the world. In more technical terms, pronouns act as a placeholder for extremely specific NPs (like proper names) where the meaning is an exact set of entities (sometimes exactly one). In (6), the pronoun she is acting as a placeholder for Juniper , which relieves speakers from saying the same name repeatedly.

(6) Juniper i is such a clever artist. Today she i drew a very funny comic.

Conventionally, the subscripted index “i” is notation that links she with Juniper , denoting coreference (i.e., elements refering to the same entity). In (6), the name Juniper acts as a linguistic antecedent; the reason a listener knows who is being talked about is because the speaker used a name, and context determines how to match names to pronouns. For referential pronouns , an antecedent can also be unspoken, instead indicated only by nonlinguistic information. Example (7) shows a nonlinguistic antecedent, which is still sufficiently informative for a listener to interpret the pronoun.

(7) (Pointing at someone with a large hat) Where do you think she 1 bought that hat?

In (7) the subscript is not a letter but a number; this notation is used to differentiate reference supported by nonlinguistic context from coreference with a linguistic antecedent. In the former, the speaker may not have talked about the referent previously in the conversation, so the pronoun is not “coreferent” with the antecedent. The antecedent is, instead, the actual person wearing the large hat.

Semantics: Anaphors

Anaphors are a subclass of pronouns that are dependent on linguistic antecedents for meaning; if the antecedent is not close enough to the anaphor, the anaphor will be nonsensical or ungrammatical. In English most anaphors are -self compounds, as in example (8). The contrast between (8a) and (8b) shows that even if the antecedent is in the same sentence, it may not be close enough to give the anaphor meaning. This relationship is commonly referred to as binding (cf. Lees and Klima 1963 ; Chomsky 1981 ).

(8) a. Cody i likes to talk about himself i . b. *Cody i thinks that everyone likes to talk about himself i .

Many syntactic and semantic theories attempt to explain when and why anaphors can or cannot be bound by antecedents. Binding theory (Chomsky 1981 , inter alia) is a model in which principles of syntactic closeness dictate the requirements on pronouns, anaphors, and other noun phrases. Binding Principle A, loosely stated in (10), formalizes the requirement that anaphors must be close enough to their antecedent to be meaningful and grammatical (as the contrast in example 6 shows). Binding Principle B accounts for the complementary distribution between pronouns and anaphors; this contrast is shown in (9).

(9) a. Cody i really likes to talk about himself i . b. Cody i really likes to talk about him i . (10) Principle A : anaphors must be bound (by an antecedent) within their binding domain (roughly, within the same finite clause) Principle B : pronouns must be free (not bound) within their binding domain

There are a few apparent exceptions to the binding principles (see Maling 1984 ; Thrainsson 1976 ). Exceptions to Principle A may be related to certain semantic constraints such as the animacy of the entity being referred to; sentient entities (especially humans) may bind anaphors even outside their own clause (see also Reuland 2001 ; Reuland and Sigurjónsdóttir 1997 ; on animacy, see Chen, this volume).

Semantics: Variable Pronouns

Both referential pronouns and anaphors denote specific entities, although the restrictions on how they get their meaning are slightly different. Variable pronouns are a third subclass of pronoun in which the semantic content is not an exact entity (or set), but instead variable depending on a quantified restriction. Example (11) shows a bound variable pronoun anteceded by an indefinite pronoun ( anyone ) and a quantified NP ( each of my students ).

(11) a. Anyone i who saw the play is sure to tell { his i / their i /her i } friends. b. Each of my students i should do { his i / their i /her i } best work.

I include his, their , and her as bound variables in (11) because all are attested; however his and their are the most common forms used by English speakers, as well as disjunctions or coordinations like his or her or his/her . In (11a) the “meaning” of his is not “some particular person, coreferential with specific antecedent”; instead, his means “any person x such that x saw the play.” Thus, if many people saw the play, then the pronoun his may in fact be true for many entities, even though it is singular. Likewise, his in (11b) means “each person x such that x is one of my students.” Variable pronouns are marked by this contingent meaning.

Formal semantic accounts of pronouns have not previously engaged deeply with the complexity of social gender, except to suggest that pronouns should match their antecedents (with certain restrictions). However, recent work on pronoun gender has begun to grapple with the ways in which gender can be highly context-dependent (e.g., Kučerová 2018 ; Sigurðsson 2019 , Hilmisdóttir 2020 ; Conrod 2019 ). In the following sections, I show more complicated issues around gendered pronouns that problematize an exclusively formal account of pronoun gender matching.

Syntax: Functional categories and universals

Pronouns are frequently taken to be functional categories. Functional categories are classes of words that are more structural or grammatical, carry less semantic information, and do not frequently change or add new words. In syntactic accounts of pronouns in the grammar, the grammatical/functional nature of pronouns is often reflected in proposals that pronouns are a sub-type of determiner (like articles or demonstratives—e.g. the , this ), rather than a sub-type of noun. Paul Postal ( 1966 ) first proposed the possibility that pronouns were determiners, not nouns. Steven Abney ( 1987 ) outlined several points in favor of analyzing pronouns as determiners as part of a larger proposal that noun phrases included functional material that paralleled clause structure.

Abney proposed specific criteria for differentiating functional categories from lexical ones; in the case of pronouns, the most apparent of these are that pronouns constitute a closed class and that pronouns lack descriptive content. A closed class is a category of words that typically does not permit neologisms, productive morphological composition, and borrowings. The closed-class nature of English pronouns has been the basis for much of the debate on the introduction of gender-neutral pronouns. Abney ( 1987 ), Curzan ( 2003 ), and Pieter Muysken ( 2008 ) all point out the resistance of mainstream English speakers in adopting neologistic gender-neutral pronouns like ze, hir , etc.

The observation that speakers resist neologisms in functional categories is also occasionally deployed in debates about singular uses of they . Commentators have argued that because pronouns are a functional category, English speakers cannot be realistically expected to adopt a new use of a pronoun for gender-neutral reference. However, a new use of singular they is already in use and accepted by a majority of the population (Conrod 2019 ). It is important to note that functional categories do undergo change, but that change is frequently slower and less noticed by speakers. Curzan ( 2003 ) includes a history of changes in English pronouns that serve as a comparison, detailing the way that Old and Middle English shifted from a grammatical gender system to a semantic or notional gender system.

Another important factor in determining whether pronouns are functional categories is that pronouns are not cross-linguistically universally homogenous, and many languages can and do have pronominal systems that are more lexical. Lexical pronoun systems are marked by a larger pronoun inventory (Thai, Vietnamese, and Burmese, for example, use many kinship terms like elder brother as pronouns; Cooke 1968 ) and much more flexibility in how speakers use these pronouns. 2 The status of pronouns as functional or lexical is of interest to scholars of gender primarily due to implications for how speakers encode social information in the grammar and what kinds of change or variation can be expected.

Pragmatics: Gender, Honorifics, and Pronoun Shifting

While this chapter focuses on gender and pronouns, pronouns also express another social dimension that will be useful for comparison. Honorific pronouns include pronouns that encode interpersonal relationship elements such as respect, authority, familiarity, and kinship. English no longer retains the honorific distinction in its pronouns, but the distinction between thou/you was historically a part of a larger cross-linguistic pattern in which pronouns included a formal and informal second person pronoun.

Roger Brown and Albert Gilman ( 1960 ) analyzed this alternation across Italian, French, Latin, Spanish, and English, generalizing the forms into “T” forms (such as thou and tu ) and “V” forms (such as you and Vous ). Historically, the social dimension along which the T/V distinction was decided was power—as in relationships of employment or nobility. However, over time and in some social contexts the T/V alternation gained another social dimension, which was social closeness or solidarity—friends who wanted to signal familiarity could use the T form to accomplish this (without implying a power differential). Chase Wesley Raymond ( 2016 ) examined the T/V alternation in contemporary Spanish in several settings, and highlighted not only instances of speakers invoking the dimensions of power and solidarity through their use of T/V forms, but also instances of speakers alternating these forms mid-conversation to accomplish pragmatic goals. By momentarily invoking either authority or familiarity, speakers could use pronouns to demonstrate affect (friendly, angry, contrite) in a way that was complementary with the content of the conversation itself.

Because these pronouns are pragmatically interpreted (i.e., not based on absolute semantic values), the sociopragmatic meaning of any honorific or (in)formal pronoun is highly context dependent. This context includes not only the social relationship between the speaker and addressee, but also cultural contexts—for example, Rusty Barrett (p.c.) notes that there are interlocutors for whom he would use the formal form when speaking Ki’che’ Maya, but the informal form when speaking Spanish. These contextual dependencies further demonstrate the flexibility and relativity by which pronouns gain their social meaning.

One other example of pronouns encoding other social dimensions exists in Thai. Thai pronouns are an open class, and the pronominal paradigm includes at least 30 different pronouns, as well as many nouns that are readily pronominalized (Palakornkul 1975 ). Like the inventories in Vietnamese and Burmese (Cooke 1968 ), Thai pronouns include kin terms, pseudo-kin terms, personal names, friendship nouns, occupations, titles, and loanwords from foreign languages. Pronouns depend on unique social relationships between interlocutors, and there are some general rules for how any given pair of speakers selects pronouns for themselves and others (Palakornkul 1975 ). Thai pronouns can also be changed mid-discourse to accomplish pragmatic goals, including both affective reasons (shock, teasing, sarcasm, emphasis) and discourse features (changes in footing or voice) (Simpson 1997 ). A similar example of a highly sociopragmatic pronominal system is Japanese; Japanese has a relatively large inventory, including eight first-person pronouns that are used differently by different speakers; in addition to honorific marking, Japanese pronoun use is sensitive to gender, age, and status (for further reading see Potts and Kawahara 2004 ; Ueno and Kehler 2016 ; McCready 2019 ). 3 The social relationships encoded in the pronouns of Japanese, Thai, or Spanish all intersect and interact with gender, which is itself a dimension of social relation; my own research (Conrod 2019 ) has also shown that these same kinds of shifts in formality can be directly compared to existing shifts in gendered pronoun use.

In the next section I turn to how gender interacts with the discursive and pragmatic goals mentioned here. After discussing innovations in some languages to introduce gender-neutral pronouns, I review instances in which pronouns can be taken up by speakers to convey affect or stance through the invocation of gender ideology.

Gendered Pronouns in Cross-linguistic and Interactional Perspective

Less than a third of the world’s languages have “natural” gender marking on pronouns (Corbett 1979 ; Siewierska 2013 ). Natural gender marking has previously been defined by pronouns (or other morphology or lexical items) aligning with the sex of the referent; however, as I will discuss in this section, gender of referents is more complicated than binary sex categories.

Gender-neutral pronoun innovations

Earlier, I cited resistance to neologisms and to change over time as evidence that pronouns are a grammatical category rather than a lexical one. However, resistance to neologism in pronouns has not stopped English speakers from innovating a third person singular gender-neutral pronoun; in this case, the emergence of this form has come from a change over time in the underlying morpho-syntactic structure of already-existent forms. Singular they has been used since at least the 15th century to refer to generic singular antecedents; within the last few decades, however, more English speakers have adopted singular they to refer to specific, definite singular antecedents as well. Not all contemporary speakers of English find this grammatical, however. In Examples (12)-(15) below, I show differing uses of singular they , ranging from the least specific (12) to the most specific (15). The scale of specificity from (12) to (15) also aligns roughly with the acceptability by English speakers: almost all speakers will accept (12) (and often 13) as grammatical, and fewer will accept or produce the sentence in (14), and again fewer accepting sentences like (15).

(12) Someone ran out of the classroom, but they forgot their backpack. Generic, indefinite antecedent (13) The ideal student completes the homework, but not if they have an emergency. Generic, definite antecedent (14) The math teacher   at my school is talented, but they often hand back grades late. Specific, definite (ungendered/distal 4 ) antecedent (15) James is great at laundry, but they never wash their dishes. Specific, definite (gendered?) name antecedent (Conrod 2019 )

Much work prior to 1990 looking at singular they focused on generic or epicene uses, as in (12) and (13). However, recent studies (including Sanford and Filik 2007 ; Foertsch and Gernsbacher 1997 ; Doherty and Conklin 2017 ; Ackerman 2018 ) examine singular they from a processing (rather than sociolinguistic) perspective, aiming to find whether English speakers find they more costly to resolve when used with singular antecedents. Processing cost can be a proxy for grammaticality, but these studies were not aimed at uncovering variation between potentially different underlying grammars. Some studies have demonstrated that singular they is variably acceptable but a dispreferred option when a gendered pronoun would be available (e.g. Sanford and Filik 2007 ; Foertsch and Gernsbacher 1997 ). The stimuli used are analogous to the example in (14)—definite (specific) antecedent NPs, but not proper names.

Very recent work begins to look at the use of singular they when referring to definite (and sometimes specific) antecedents. Bronwyn Bjorkman ( 2017 ) offers a syntactic analysis of a possible diachronic change in the morphosyntactic features of pronouns that have shifted to allow for definite antecedents of singular they . The old system of morphosyntactic gender for Bjorkman was privative, binary features that differentiated he and she , so that any definite antecedent would be referred to with either of these choices. Bjorkman proposes a change in the nature of features: rather than a forced choice, she suggests that gender features in English pronouns have shifted to optional adjunct features. That is, a pronoun may be marked as either masculine or feminine, but it also may be marked for neither gender. This forces a reorganization of the pronominal paradigm in English to allow for a gender-neutral singular pronoun, which has surfaced as they .

Another work that addresses the question of singular they specifically in the context of nonbinary definite specific antecedents is by Ackerman ( 2018 ). In a study of the acceptability of singular they co-referenced with names and indefinite antecedents, Ackerman found that the anaphor themself was about equally acceptable as themselves when paired with a proper name (of any gender), and only slightly less acceptable than themselves when paired with an indefinite antecedent.

In my own work, I have probed the variation in both acceptability and production of singular they through two experiments, both of which focus primarily on specific, definite uses like the one in example (15) in which the antecedent is a proper name. The data from both experiments show that age is a contributing factor to production and acceptability of definite singular they , suggesting that there is an ongoing language change occurring in English.

The first experiment consisted of sociolinguistic interviews of paired participants, with an aim toward eliciting third person pronoun. Each participant also filled out a demographic survey, including information about their age, gender identity, and other social variables (see Conrod 2019 for full discussion).

This experiment included 22 participants matched into 11 pairs. The ages of the participants ranged from 19 to 71. Participant gender fell into three groups: 6 were masculine-aligned, 11 were feminine-aligned, and 5 were other/neutral. I analyzed the production of singular they by each participant, measuring both the token count (how many times a speaker actually said they/them/their about a singular referent) and by proportional rate (the percentage of all pronouns that the speaker used). Figure 1 shows the relationship between speaker age and production of singular they .

Participant age influences use of singular “they.”

The second experiment was an online survey of acceptability, aimed at testing the relative acceptability of singular pronouns with the different types of antecedents shown in (12)–(15). This experiment included demographic questions with the intention of examining interspeaker variation in acceptability of singular they .

The experiment stimuli each consisted of two sentences, containing an antecedent and a singular pronoun. The conditions for test stimuli included what type of antecedent (quantificational, generic definite, feminine name, masculine name, or gender-neutral name) and what pronoun was used ( he, she , or they ). Examples of the two-sentence stimuli are given in (16)–(18).

(16) John is very forgetful. He (/she/they) never remember(s) library due dates. (Name + he / she/they ) (17) Students are very ambitious. Every student tries to write his/her/their essay perfectly. (Quantified NP + he/she/they ) (18) The perfect spouse is very thoughtful. He/she/they will always try to remember anniversaries. (Generic definite + he/she/they )

Participants were asked to rate sentences for “naturalness,” with a rating of 1 being the least natural and 7 being the most natural. They were then asked to comment on what factors influenced their sentence ratings, followed by a demographics survey.

The full results of this experiment are discussed in Conrod ( 2019 ). Looking only at the ratings of they , the effect of antecedent on ratings was most clear: generic antecedents led to they being rated quite highly, while there was more variability for proper names (of all genders) and quantified NPs.

Participant age showed a similar pattern in the acceptability task as it did in the previous experiment for ratings of they , primarily for proper names. Figure 2 shows the acceptability ratings for all sentences including singular they by age group, and demonstrates the difference in ratings by speaker age. There was no such effect for he or she , only they .

Ratings of singular “they” by age.

The drop-off in ratings for older participants is much more pronounced for (any gender) proper names, and much less so for generic and quantified NPs. Figure 3 shows the age effect for antecedents that were proper names; there was not an age-effect for other types of antecedents.

The influence of age on ratings of singular “they” depends on antecedent type.

While Experiment One had few young participants (only 4 were born after 1992), Experiment Two had many more young adults (137 were born after 1992). Thus, while Experiment One gives little clear data into the use of the most recent generation of speakers, Experiment Two suggests that these young speakers accept singular they more readily even when it is used with proper names. The data in both of the experiments shown here are compatible with an apparent time analysis (of the type discussed in Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968 ), meaning that interspeaker variation dependent upon age is indicative of an on-going language change in real time.

These experiments also showed that participants who identified themselves as nonbinary and/or transgender used singular they much more (as seen in Experiment One) and rate it much higher regardless of antecedent (as seen in Experiment Two). In both experiments there was not a significant difference between men and women, only between men/women and “other” genders. In Experiment Two I also found that the difference for antecedents found in the general study population did not apply to either transgender or nonbinary gender participants.

Another important finding from Experiment Two comes from a free-response question in the post-ratings survey, which asked participants what factors influenced their decisions when rating sentences. The responses to this question included many metalinguistic comments that specifically targeted pronouns, especially singular they . Of comments about the acceptability, 37% included the word “gender,” 20% included the word “singular,” 6% included the words “singular they” (only 3.6% included the word “trans”). Below are examples of comments in answer to the question asking respondents why they picked certain ratings for different sentences:

(19) a. Some of them had unusual pronouns which sound slightly unnatural but are gradually becoming more acceptable . b. I still find unexpected uses of he/she/they weird but gave them a middle 4 because I know the rules are changing and why [emph added] c. Whilst I know the use of they as, a pronoun is growing , I find it doesn’t sound right.

Respondents who commented about singular they made various comments about its grammaticality (both for and against), suggesting that as a variable undergoing change singular they is salient and its users are aware of their use of it. Examples (19b) and (19c), for instance, show explicit comments on the respondents’ awareness of ongoing linguistic change.

Other comments particularly noted the use of generic he as less acceptable and they as the preferred generic pronoun:

(20) Sometimes the pronouns felt forced. For example, when a genderless subject was introduced in the first sentence it felt unnatural to assign a gendered pronoun (he or she) to the subject in the second sentence. Most people I know use ‘they’ if they don’t know the gender of the person they are referring to or if they are talking hypothetically about a generic person. (21) I mostly rated sentences lower if there was no specific gender implied but a ““he”“ or ““she”“ ( sic ) was used as a generic pronoun. “Their” as a generic pronoun is preferred.

That respondents are aware of an ongoing change, and that they notice generic versus specific uses of singular they , again suggests that the change is salient and conscious. In the cases of comments on generic he , many commented that they found the construction unnecessarily gendered. This speaks to the older origins of singular they before the widespread use of its definite, specific use; as a generic pronoun, it is the only truly gender-neutral pronoun to use with non-gendered antecedents. Popular use of generic singular they with its surrounding discourse of gender neutrality makes it ripe for re-analysis as a gender-neutral specific pronoun—what had to change, then, was the conception of individuals being able to be gender-neutral.

In cases where respondents commented specifically on singular they , many referred to their own queer/transgender identity, or the presence of LGBT+ people in their close social network. This was often in support of the newer use of singular they :

(22) I heartily support ““they”“ ( sic ) pronouns for individuals, and not assuming gender based on names. I’m queer. I’m good at spelling and grammar. (23) Some questions used names and pronouns that are not commonly used together, and referred to people with a singular ‘they’ which may only have been noticeable to me because I am transgender (24) I’ve spent enough time in queer/trans/non-binary social contexts at this point that that stuff is natural for me now and remarkable only to the extent that I’d expect some other folks to take exception. (25) My answers to they/them for a specific person have shifted much more positive in the last few years, thanks to nonbinary friends.

This explicit association between specific singular they and gender/queer identity suggests that a driving force behind singular they is indeed the association with individuals who have intentionally made an effort to carve out a space for identity outside binary gender. These comments strongly point toward the social meaning of specific singular they ; namely, in order to use singular they for a specific (named) antecedent, a speaker must believe it is possible for a particular (named, human) person to be neither male nor female. In other words, speakers will use they when neither he nor she will do. This is consistent with Ackerman’s ( 2018 ) findings that acceptance of singular they with a proper name is correlated with having nonbinary acquaintances.

In sum, singular they is an example of a grammatical innovation that has happened in concert with (and perhaps due to) significant social-cultural changes that are underway; but it is also an example of grammatical change seizing on the most exploitable linguistic resource available. While English pronouns have long resisted widespread use of neologisms to denote a gender-neutral specific referent, the extension by analogy of an already-existing element (epicene singular they ) has proven much more readily adopted.

In the next two subsections, I compare how English speakers have adapted to the “problem” of shifts in the gender landscape with how certain other languages have worked out their own solutions—for instance, by a loan word (in Swedish) or by morphophonological analogy (in Spanish). Languages with morphological gender marking have been studied in this regard to varying degrees: Orit Bershtling ( 2014 ) has described pragmatic strategies undertaken by Hebrew speakers, and a special issue of H-France Salon edited by Vinay Swamy and Louisa Mackenzie ( 2019 ) includes more extensive discussion of the nonbinary pronoun iel in French. My focus is on Swedish and Spanish. While Swedish has a relatively similar situation to English (where gender is marked mainly on pronouns), languages like Spanish face additional challenges of gender marking on articles and common nouns.

Swedish hen

Swedish singular third person pronouns, like English ones, are gendered, which poses a similar problem for erasing sexist bias from the language and for referring to nonbinary referents. However, rather than reorganize the pronominal paradigm as English is doing, Swedish speakers have taken up a third, gender-neutral pronoun hen . Not only does hen pattern well with already-existing Swedish words han and hon , but it has been loaned into Swedish from the Finnish hän , which already had no pronominal gender marking to begin with (Stahlberg et al. 2007 ; Prewitt-Freilino, Caswell, and Laakso 2012 ).

There are not currently large-scale experimental or corpus reviews of the use of hen by Swedish speakers in natural contexts; however, hen has had considerable uptake by print and popular media in Sweden in the 2010s, and in 2014 it was included in the Swedish Academy Glossary (SAOL). Marie Gustafsson Sendén, Emma A. Bäck, and Anna Lindqvist ( 2015 ) review attitudes about hen , as well as self-reports of its use, in a cross-sectional study that sampled between 2012 and 2015. The authors found that in 2012 attitudes towards hen were largely negative, but that this pattern reversed by 2015; they also found that more participants reported using hen themselves over the course of the study time (although the pattern did not invert completely).

Swedish speakers’ uptake of hen is unusual among the world’s languages for two reasons: first, it is (as far as we know) the first language to have successfully introduced a novel gender-neutral pronoun into mainstream use; and second, it is among the relatively rare cases in which a pronoun is introduced into a language through borrowing.

Spanish elle and endings

Spanish has gendered articles and pronouns that reflect the social gender of the referent; however, the morphological marking in Spanish on common nouns has also been the subject of much debate. Feminist scholars have pointed out the apparent bias in using the masculine plural as a generic plural for mixed-gender groups since the 1980s, and have recommended linguistic practices such as conjunctions to include both genders when referring to mixed or generic groups ( los y las estudientes, Latinos y Latinas ) (Lomotey 2011 ; Bengoechea 2014 ). Recently, this movement has expanded to even more gender-inclusive ways of expression, including gender-neutral neologisms and morphemes. Lenguaje Inclusivo , or “inclusive language,” can now refer to several different strategies that speakers take to avoid misgendering or introducing bias.

In one emergent strategy, the masculine -o or feminine -a nominal endings are replaced with “placeholding” letters, including @ (symbolizing o and a together) and - x (pronounced/-εks/). Words like Latin@ and Latinx are more prevalent in written communication, including online communication; however, there is not an obvious (or widely accepted) pronunciation for -@, and the pronunciation for - x does not fit the phonological/phonotactic constraints of many spoken Spanishes (Hinojosa 2016 ). Likewise, neither -@ nor - x can “solve” the problem of singular pronouns in Spanish, since the distinction between pronominal forms ( él/ella ) does not pattern with the typical - o/-a endings.

Another strategy that has been taken up by nonbinary Spanish speakers is to replace -o/-a with a singular non-gendered ending, -e . This was proposed by Álvaro García Meseguer ( 1976 ) as a strategy to combat sexist language, but was not broadly taken up by Spanish speakers until recently (Papadopoulos 2018 ). This ending is already attested in Spanish and is already understood to be gender-neutral both in the singular and the plural; words like estudiante(s) only show gender through agreement with articles like los/las or el/la (Papadopoulos 2018 ). This strategy has been taken up both in written and spoken communication; here I include some attested uses from Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson (p.c.). The exchange reproduced in example (26) is a conversation about the - e ending that took place on Facebook.

(26) Speaker A : Ah buen. Chau chiques buen viaje a todes . Oh ok. Bye folks.N.PL safe travel to all.N.PL Me voy a seguir viendo Doctor Who sola I will continue watching Doctor Who alone Speaker B:   chau chicos no sera? bye! Bye folks.M.PL wouldn’t it be? bye!!! Speaker A:   No, es chiques . No, it’s folks.N.PL Speaker C:   Mmmmm, si vos querés decir así , Mmmmm, if you want to say it like that es tu tema, pero me da lastima como quieren destruir el lenguaje it’s your thing, but it saddens me how you all want to destroy the language Speaker D:   Si te importara el lenguaje, sabrías que lástima va con tilde . If language mattered to you, you’d know that ‘saddens’ has an accent. Además, las lenguas vivas se llaman así porque cambian constantemente . Plus, living languages.F.PL are called that because they change constantly No se destruye jamás sino que se adapta a los nuevos tiempos It will never be destroyed; rather it adapts to new times y las necesidades de las hablantes and the needs of the speakers

Speaker A uses the gender-inclusive chiques (“folks”) in a post, and Speakers B, C, and D comment on that use. Spanish speakers who use lenguaje inclusivo (inclusive language) (as in this example) do not replace all grammatical gender markers with -e ; note that while speaker D is defending the use of chiques , the common noun phrase las lenguas vivas (“living languages”) still shows its grammatical gender and concord within the noun phrase.

Along with the - e ending (formed by morphological analogy extension), lenguaje inclusivo includes the option for a gender-neutral singular pronoun ( elle ). Ben Papadopoulos ( 2018 ) reports that elle is attested in spoken Spanish, along with a parallel - i form ( elli, uni personi rubi ). (For further reading on nonbinary language in Spanish, see Ojeda 2018 ; La Asemblea No Binarie 2018 ; Sánchez 2018 ; Gillon and Figueroa 2018 .)

The issue of gendered morphology in languages with grammatical gender is not restricted to pronouns, but gender inflection and pronouns share some common properties. Noun endings, like pronouns, are functional rather than lexical elements of the language, and as such they are resistant to change or neologism. Nevertheless, genderqueer and transgender speakers are at the forefront of grammatical innovation in these language communities. Current linguistic research on how these speakers are using and changing gender marking in language is just starting out, and future work will go further in describing and analyzing the changes that are underway.

Misgendering

Gender intersects with politeness more obviously when people use a pronoun dispreferred by the referent, also known as misgendering. Kevin McLemore ( 2015 , 2018 ) has shown that transgender people suffer negative psychological effects from being misgendered by others. Misgendering is not a phenomenon exclusive to transgender people, but it is most experienced by trans people. I will review two experiments aimed at determining whether there is a correlation between misgendering and attitudes about transgender people. Both studies show evidence that speakers with negative attitudes about transgender people (conscious or subconscious) are more likely to misgender people.

My first experiment looking at misgendering is a corpus study of online comments on Twitter about prominent transgender activist Chelsea Manning. I found that tweeters were more likely to misgender Manning with pronouns than by using the wrong name; this appears to be related to the fact that pronouns are a grammatical category, while names are lexical. Misgendering through use of pronouns may therefore be more related to unconscious attitudes than to conscious ones (Conrod 2017 ).

The second experiment on misgendering is based on the same data as Experiment One from Section 3 earlier (which is fully described in Conrod 2017 , 2019 ). To probe whether misgendering was related to transphobia or unconscious attitudes about trans people, I designed a sociolinguistic study to elicit pronoun use about transgender people in natural conversational contexts. To measure attitudes about transgender people, I included a measure of unconscious attitudes (responding to film clips with a transgender character) and conscious ones (participants answered questions about their attitudes and rated their feelings towards various groups of people). The results of this experiment did not show a relationship between misgendering and explicit attitudes toward transgender people, but there was a relationship between misgendering and implicit attitudes toward transgender people. Participants who rated the transgender character from the film clips more negatively in film clips about her transgender identity also had more pronouns misgendering people (including both actual referents and fictional ones in the film clips).

I conclude from this work that unconscious attitudes are more likely to influence gendered pronoun use; this is crucial for matters of transgender activism and equality because misgendering disproportionately affects trans people. No cisgender people were misgendered in the study, and while misgendering can affect cis people, it is frequently related to attitudes about gender binarity and essentialism. It is also important to consider this finding in the context of social psychological research that finds that misgendering significantly impacts the mental health and well-being of transgender people (McLemore 2015 , 2018 ). Other work (e.g. Bradley 2019 ) also connects pronoun use with endorsement of a binary gender system and gender ideology. The fact that unconscious transphobia is apparently more linked to pronoun use may further be an effect of the fact that pronouns are a functional category, not lexical, and thus speakers are not always consciously aware of what pronoun they have used.

The innovations in gender-neutral pronouns in various languages suggest that gender as a social category is undergoing some change, and the findings of my experiments around misgendering and pronouns show that gendered pronouns have a relationship to apparently unconscious ideas about gender. There are also instances in which speakers will invoke gender through pronouns intentionally to convey stance or affect, similarly to the uses of honorific pronouns.

Gender play vs misgendering

In social contexts where gender is viewed as expressive and dynamic, speakers use pronouns to convey information not directly related to the gender identity of a referent, but often related (and somewhat abstracted from) gender performance or expression. Blair Rudes and Bernard Healy ( 1979 ), for example, performed an ethnography of the gay subculture in Buffalo, New York. They found that the use of she among gay men was not a type of misgendering (i.e., not proposing that the referent was in fact a woman), but instead the word she was repurposed to index various intracommunity meanings relevant in that context, such as artificiality (inauthenticity) or outlandishness. These meanings were not directly predicated upon the supposition of an absolute female identity or categorization, but rather extrapolated from gendered stereotypes that could be drawn upon at will.

A more modern example of the use of he or she in gay scenes can be pulled from popular contemporary drag culture. In the ninth episode of reality television show Ru Paul’s Drag Race , one contestant was performing poorly. Judges were questioning the contestant’s performance as a drag queen, both in aspects of style and craftsmanship, and in aspects of actual staged performance. In the following examples, judges and other contestants use him to refer to the contestant when expressing negative or critical affect, but her when expressing support. 5

(63) a. We are actually rooting for Jaymes and want him to shine, but he’s gonna have to believe in himself to really sell this challenge. b. Jaymes’ audition tape was so funny, I got it. I understood the shtick. But I think that since she’s been in this competition with the other girls, she’s thrown off.

The example given here is not directly comparable to Rudes and Healy’s ( 1979 ) analysis of the use of she because theirs is linked to a (highly abstracted) idea of femaleness. I would argue, however, that the use of she in the context just cited and others from the show are not an abstracted version of femaleness, but rather a result of a metaphorical connection between femaleness and performance that has derived from the nature of the show as a competition in performing arts and craft (cf. Calder, this volume).

These abstracted or metaphorical uses of pronouns are not the only ways pronouns can be used in drag or gay communities for in-group meanings. Alternations between she and he may also be used in drag communities to differentiate between performers and their drag personae, or to signal in-group solidarity rooted in gender non-conformity. I include these examples as a comparison point for ways that misgendering—which is a form of linguistic harm, intentional or not—and pronoun play should not be conflated. In analyzing gendered pronouns, future work should focus particularly on these alternations as a rich source of information about the social power and significance of gender that is independent from supposedly “natural” sex categories.

Conclusion and future directions

As with many forms of language that are closely tied to identity, pronouns can be used to harm, to affirm, to build relationships, and to play among beloved friends. Scholars of language would do well to keep in mind the strong association between apparently grammatical categories and the power of words to shape peoples’ lives. Under a theory of linguistic performativity, pronouns necessarily play a role in how speech acts can create consensus reality (Butler 2013 ); for gendered pronouns especially, the pronouns used by and about a person are part of the complex tapestry of linguistic identity formation and performance. Just as pronouns can be used to recreate and affirm a person’s gendered location in the world, misusing pronouns intentionally or accidentally can constitute a form of symbolic violence that systematically oppresses people whose gendered existence is already marginalized (Bourdieu 1979 ). In investigations of the formal linguistic properties of gender features and other grammatical instances of gender, linguists should consider the close analogy between gender and honorific marking as a similarly grammaticalized form of social relationships. Elin McCready ( 2019 ) is one scholar who has taken up this project from a semantic approach, and it is my hope that other scholars will follow her lead.

This chapter has reviewed broad issues around gender and pronouns, including syntactic and semantic structural issues as well as sociopragmatic ones. In presenting work on misgendering, gender-neutral language innovation, and expressive use of gender, I hope to encourage linguists to explore more thoroughly the rich landscape of gender marking in the grammar as part of a social dimension along which language users may navigate.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Kira Hall and Rusty Barrett for including me in this volume, and for their dedicated editorial support. Barbara Citko and Alicia Beckford Wassink were wonderfully supportive during the writing of this chapter. Thank you to Lauren Ackerman, Edwin Howard, Brooke Larson, Leah Velleman, and Elin McCready for their intellectual engagement and help in developing my thinking on these matters and others. Remaining errors are my own.

Abney, Steven P. 1987. The English noun phrase in its sentential aspect . PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ackerman, Lauren . 2018. “Being themself: Processing and resolution of singular (im)personal they.” Paper presented at the 31st Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (CUNY2018), University of California Davis. Accessed at https://osf.io/zmpjc/ .

Ackerman, Lauren . 2019 . “ Syntactic and cognitive issues in investigating gendered coreference. ” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4, no. 1: 117.1–27.

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Here are examples of this conflation from two well-known feminist linguists:

“[…] although an individual’s gender-related place in society is a multidimensional complex that can only be characterized through careful analysis, his or her sex is generally a readily observable binary variable…” (Eckert 1989 ).

“The term ‘sex’ has often been used to refer to the physiological distinction between males and females, with ‘gender’ referring to the social and cultural elaboration of the sex difference—a process that restricts our social roles, opportunities, and expectations. Since the process begins at birth, it could be argued that ‘gender’ is the more appropriate term to use for the category than ‘sex’” (Cheshire 2002 ).

For further reading on how pronouns can be categorized while recognizing cross-linguistic differences, start with Déchaine and Wiltschko ( 2002 ), Cardinaletti ( 1994 ), and Ritter ( 1995 ).

I am not currently aware of research on the use of any pronouns or honorific marking by genderqueer or transgender speakers of the languages mentioned here (Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, Javanese, or Japanese).

See Conrod ( 2019 ) (chapter 4) for a close investigation of what exactly a “distal” pronoun is in English, and why (14) and (15) should be different at all (considering that they are both referring to specific individuals).

Transcript source for Ru Paul’s Drag Race season 9, episode 2: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=rupauls-drag-race-2009&episode=s09e02 .

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German state of Bavaria bans gender-sensitive language in schools and other public bodies

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BERLIN (AP) — The German state of Bavaria on Tuesday banned the use of gender-sensitive language in classrooms and university lecture halls, the latest salvo in an often-rancorous debate about whether the German language should become more inclusive.

The Bavarian state government approved amendments to regulations governing the use of German in all public institutions, including schools and universities, German news agency dpa reported.

Some Germans want their language to evolve to become less male-dominated. For example, some people and organizations have begun deploying a pause or symbol in the middle of plural nouns and favor the feminine word for people to reflect gender diversity.

However, conservatives accuse progressives of trying to force clunky and unnecessary change on citizens, including those who want to stick to more conventional forms.

The amended Bavarian regulation expressly forbids state authorities from inserting a pause, asterisk or colon - all signifiers of inclusivity - into a noun, in official documents and correspondence or during lessons. It was unclear whether teachers or other state employees would face penalties for breaking the rules.

Florian Herrmann, a senior aide to conservative Bavarian premier Markus Soeder, said the promotion of gender-sensitive language was driven by ideology and risked having an exclusionary effect on those who didn’t adopt it.

“For us, the message is: language must be clear and understandable,” Herrmann said. “But it is also about keeping open the space for discourse in a liberal society.”

Physics Ph.D. candidate wins 2024 Three Minute Thesis competition

By | Katya Hrichak , Cornell University Graduate School

“I want you to remember a time when you were in a setting where you felt like you didn’t belong. I want you to remember how you felt in that setting, maybe isolated or out of place, and how much you felt like you wanted to continue going back to that setting—probably not much. These feelings are all too familiar for undergraduate women pursuing their studies in science, and in physics specifically,” began Meagan Sundstrom, a doctoral candidate in physics at the ninth annual Cornell University Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition.

Alongside seven other finalists, Sundstrom presented her dissertation research in just three minutes on March 20 to a panel of judges and an audience from across campus while additional friends, family, advisors, and lab mates watched online. In the first in-person Cornell 3MT since 2019, presentations were judged by how clearly and compellingly students summarized their research to a general audience, using only one static slide.

Sundstrom’s presentation, “Recognizing and Removing Barriers for Women in Physics,” earned her first place and $1,500. Second place and $1,000 was awarded to information science doctoral student Sterling Williams-Ceci for her presentation, “AI Helps us Write – but at What Cost?”

After nearly 60 in-person and 70 virtual audience members cast their ballots, votes were tallied and the People’s Choice Award and $250 were presented to biomedical and biological sciences doctoral candidate Sharada Gopal for her presentation, “Worming Our Way to a Longer Life.”

This year’s judges included Jane Bunker, director of Cornell University Press; Joe Ellis, director of online degree program development at eCornell; David Lodge, the Francis J. DiSalvo Director of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability; and Bob Riter, patient advocate for the Cornell Community Cancer Partnership. Organization of the competition and coaching of presenters was provided by the Graduate School Office of Career and Professional Development.

“As grad students, there are a lot of opportunities to give your elevator pitch at conferences and more professional settings to more senior people in your field, and I thought this would be a really cool opportunity for me to try to tailor that pitch to a more general audience—how would I describe my research to my family and friends?—so that was fun,” said Sundstrom.

Being able to “zoom out” and view her topic from a different perspective was also helpful for Sundstrom, who is currently writing her dissertation and appreciates having both formulated a storyline and thought about the broader impacts of her work.

Williams-Ceci similarly enjoyed the chance to speak to a different type of audience than she is used to addressing.

“I hadn’t really had an opportunity in grad school to try communicating to a broad audience, it’s always just to my lab, so I wanted to practice having a chance to really tell a story and not just go through the slides,” she said. “It really helped me know for a fact that I can tell a convincing story about a project that I’ve done.”

Gopal shared that the 3MT was a fun way to combine her longtime artistic interests with her science.

“It seemed like such a fun event. I did a lot of theatre in college so I thought, ‘What can I do artistically here?’ and this seemed like a good mix of my scientific interest and my artistic theatre interests,” she said, adding that she also benefitted from looking at the bigger picture of her work and its impacts.

The 3MT competition was first held in 2008 at the University of Queensland and has since been adopted by over 900 universities in over 85 countries. 3MT challenges research degree students to present a compelling story on their dissertation or thesis and its significance in just three minutes, in language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.

Cornell’s Graduate School first hosted a 3MT competition in 2015 and the event has grown steadily since that time. As the winner of Cornell’s competition, Sundstrom will now go on to compete in northeast regional competitions.

“Our Three Minute Thesis final round is a highlight of the year for those of us in the Graduate School—literally we talk about it all year long,” said Kathryn J. Boor, dean of the Graduate School and vice provost for graduate education. “We look forward to it because it’s just plain fun, and it’s an opportunity for us to watch and learn from our accomplished and creative graduate researchers.”

“I could not possibly be more proud of the work we saw,” she said.

Read the story on the Cornell University Graduate School website.

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