The Minor Parts of Speechunknown are also occasionally referred to by neuter pronouns. A system in
which the gender of a word depends upon characteristics of its referent is
called a natural gender system.
Other languages, such as French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Gaelic,
have grammatical gender systems. The choice of gender is not dependent
upon characteristics of a word’s referent; rather, words may be assigned to
gender classes, often according to formal linguistic criteria. In Italian and
Spanish, for example, words ending in {-a} are typically feminine; in Ger-
man, words ending in {-chen} are typically neuter. However, many nouns
in these languages are assigned to gender classes somewhat arbitrarily and
so when learning a noun one must also learn its gender. Also in these lan-
guages, the gender system is reflected not only in the pronouns and nouns,
but in adjectives and articles, too. In Spanish, a noun and any article or
adjective modifying it must agree in gender; if the noun is masculine, then
any associated article or adjective must be masculine (e.g., el libro blanco,
lit. the book white, “the white book”). If the noun is feminine, its modi-
fiers must also be feminine (e.g., la casa blanca, lit. the house white, “the
white house”).
In recent years the English gender system has given rise to much discus-
sion of the issue of sexism in language and the need to develop forms that
are sex-neutral. Standard written English makes it difficult not to refer to
the sex of a human referent when choosing a personal pronoun, regardless
of whether the person’s sex is relevant or even known or knowable. For ex-
ample, compare the sentences Every doctor works hard for her patients and
Every doctor works hard for his patients. The first suggests that all doctors
are women; the second that they are all men. Clearly neither need be true.
Traditional prescriptive grammars have required that the pronoun after
quantifiers such as every and some be masculine—and in general that the
generic pronoun be the masculine one. Many people find this norm to be
objectionable and would like to find expressions that would not give any
indication of the referent’s sex for use in situations where sex is irrelevant.
Many writers now use forms of they when a generic pronoun is required.
The following is from a Cambridge University Press publication:... while
someone is taking their turn in a conversation,... (Meyer 2002: 76).
And growing numbers of organizations require that their publications be
sex-neutral. We return to this topic in our chapter on Language Variation
in Book II.