A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§8.2 Personal pronouns 103

comes out of hospital Y.QH should take a holiday together} or it might not (Will

you now please turn to page 58).

Last, if both questions get a negative answer, a 3rd person form is used. That

means any 3rd person NP will normally be taken to refer to people (or things)

other than the speaker and addressee, though in a few cases we find the speaker

or addressee being referred to in the 3rd person. For example, in formal writing,

expressions like the writer or the reader are sometimes used instead of I st or 2nd

person pronouns.

Non-deictic use of you

There is a secondary, non-deictic, use for 2nd person you in which it does not
refer to any particular person(s}: Yo u could hear a pin drop or Yo u can 't do that
kind of thing when you 're pregnant (which could be addressed to a man no less
than to a woman). Here it is used to talk about people generally, and is equivalent
to the slightly formal one, a less prototypical member of the personal pronoun
category.

Gender

The 3rd person singular pronouns contrast in gender, which is a classification of

NPs that has a variety of dimensions in some languages but in English revolves

mainly around sex.

The masculine gender pronoun he is used for males -humans or animals that

have salient enough sexual characteristics for us to think ofthem as differentiated

(certainly for gorillas, usually for ducks, probably not for rats, certainly not for

cockroaches).

The feminine gender pronoun she is used for females, and also, by extension, for

certain other things conventionally treated in a similar way: political entities

(France has recalled her ambassador) and certain personified inanimates, espe­

cially ships (May God bless her and all who sail in her).

The neuter pronoun it is used for inanimates, or for male or female

animals (especially lower animals and non-cuddly creatures), and sometimes for

human infants if the sex is unknown or considered irrelevant: The baby grunted

again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its fa ce to see what was the matter

with ft.

Choice of a singular human pronoun without sex specification

No singular 3rd person pronoun in English is universally accepted as appropriate for

referring to a human when you don't want to specify sex. The need for such a pro­

noun is often acute, especially where no particular person is referred to and the

antecedent is indefinite and applicable to both males and females. The pronoun

most widely used in such cases is they, in a secondary use that is interpreted seman­

tically as singular. (In its primary use, of course, it refers to groups and has plural