Pronoun Reference Research Articles

Sloppy identity unbound

Reinhart (1983) claims that only pronouns whose antecedents c-command them may give rise to sloppy identity readings. This paper presents counterexamples to this claim; for instance, referring to the famous 1960 televised presidential debate, it is acceptable to say: "Kennedy looked good. People voted for him. Nixon looked bad. People didn't." Despite the fact that the antecedent "Kennedy" for the pronoun "him" is in a previous sentence, this pronoun allows a sloppy identity reading wherein the fourth sentence ("People didn't.") means that people didn't vote for Nixon. To analyze such cases, I first propose an extension to the ~ focus operator due to Rooth (1992), allowing this operator to alter the assignment function used to interpret pronouns. One construction where Rooth places ~ is in the answers to questions. My new meaning for ~ explains why pronouns are so constrained in answers, e.g., "Who does John like? He[=John] likes Mary." Next, I argue for the Question-Under-Discussion (QUD) model of discourse described in Roberts (1996), which theorizes that every sentence is the answer to an explicit or implicit question. Finally, I show that unbound sloppy identity can be analyzed as cases where pronouns are constrained by antecedents in implicit questions. Along the way, I argue that the QUD model is compatible with the coherence relation model of discourse due to Hobbs (1979), explaining how coherence can constrain pronoun reference as well.

Gender representation in the 1999 Nigerian constitution: A critical discourse analysis for socio-political equity

The article appraises gender representation in the 1999 Nigerian Constitution using insights from critical discourse analysis, feminism and systemic functional linguistics, with particular emphasis on grammatical cohesion. Specifically, it examines lexical and grammatical expressions that encode gender in the Constitution, the ideological positions evident in these expressions, and their impact on gender parity and socio-political equity. The focus is on the reference-antecedent cohesion of gender-marked pronouns and nouns used to refer to individuals and social/political positions. Our findings show a preponderance of generic masculine noun and pronoun references, tracking antecedents that refer to social and political positions open to eligible individuals in Nigeria, while the single feminine referent was a marked case. These findings buttress the ‘male-as-norm’ ideology and the relegation to anonymity of the female gender in this important national document. For equity and fairness, the article recommends revising the Constitution with epicene expressions to expunge gender biases.

Clefts and their relatives by Matthew Reeve (review)

Matthew Reeve. Clefts and their relatives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012. 236 pp. [Linguistik Aktuell, 185.] The book Clefts and their relatives by Matthew Reeve offers a new account of the syntax and semantics of clefts in English and Russian. The book tries to solve a number of puzzles in a uniform way and raises the theoretically important issue of compositionality, which according to the author should be formulated in a non-traditional way. However, the Russian data used in the book are often debatable, so that some of the arguments for the proposed analysis are not convincing. The book consists of six chapters. In the first chapter the author notes the lack of a thorough analysis of clefts in English and Russian. In the second he proposes a syntactic analysis of English clefts. The third chapter discusses the licensing of relative clauses in English clefts. The fourth offers an analysis of clefts in Russian similar to that proposed for English. In the fifth chapter the syntax of specificational sentences is discussed, and some remaining issues with the syntax of clefts are resolved. Chapter 6 concludes the book. The main focus of this review is the analysis of Russian clefts, since this topic is of particular interest to JSL readers. However, in order to present the theory that Reeve proposes for Russian clefts we must first discuss his analysis of clefts in English, at least in outline. The discussion of the Russian clefts will contain more details, critical points, and counterexamples. Examples in this review come from various sources. Some are taken from the book under review (listed as [R] and the page number). Most of the other examples come from the Russian National Corpus (RNC) (http://ruscorpora.ru/en/index.html) and from a small survey I created online to confirm my intuition on constructed examples. My respondents' judgments are reported for the relevant examples and are marked [Q]. 1. Clefts in English Clefts in English, such as (1), consist of a pronoun (it), a copula (was), a focused XP (John), and a restrictive relative clause, also known as the cleft clause (that Mary saw). The main question is what the syntactic relation is between these elements. Reeve proposes that the cleft pronoun is non-expletive, that the cleft clause is adjoined to the clefted XP, and that the cleft clause semantically modifies the initial pronoun. Reeve argues against other theories of clefts which either analyze the pronoun it as an expletive, thus unifying clefts with focus-fronting (Kiss 1998), or treat the cleft clause as extraposed from the cleft pronoun (Percus 1997). He also argues that the relative clause has to be licensed syntactically and semantically, but that in the case of clefts there are two separate licensers, each satisfying one of the conditions. (1) It was JOHN that Mary saw. [R 1] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In chapter 2 Reeve provides arguments in favor of two of his claims, namely, that the pronoun in clefts is non-expletive and that the cleft clause is adjoined to the clefted XP and not to the pronoun. Evidence for the non-expletive nature of the clause-initial pronoun is both syntactic and semantic. The first piece of syntactic evidence is that cleft it, but not expletive it (such as weather pronouns and raising it), can be replaced by a demonstrative pronoun this. Second, cleft it can control PRO, which is unexpected if it is an expletive, as in (2). (2) a. It was THE FURNITURE that annoyed John on Sunday [despite PRO being THE DECOR the day before]. b. It seemed that John was wrong [without it/*PRO seeming that Mary was right]. [R 12, 11] Third, evidence from Germanic languages suggests that there are different kinds of expletives and that languages can allow the use of pro for some expletives but not for others (Vikner 1995). However, in these languages pro is never allowed for referential pronouns. …

‘It’ subject constructions in Xitsonga

This article examines the referential and the non-referential pronoun ‘it’ subject constructions in Xitsonga, both of which manifest themselves in different forms and contexts. The various forms of the referential subject pronoun follow the class grouping of the antecedent noun or noun-equivalent from which the pronoun is morphosyntactically derived. Specifically, ten forms of the referential subject ‘it’ are distinguished in Xitsonga. These are wona, rona, xona, yona, rona, byona, kona, kona, kona and dyona. It is argued that the form of the non-referential pronoun is informed by the types of clauses in which it occurs. The form ku (it is) appears in subject constructions pinpointing weather clauses, and the form i (it is) occurs in subject expressions referring to time, distances, clefts, identity as well as in noun/infinitive constructions. This article holds that ‘it’ is a subject construction in Xitsonga, and that the referential subject is a semantic-bearing element, whereas the non-referential subject is an empty constituent. This study differs from other studies within the Bantu language family in that it examines the notion of subjecthood from three different theoretical frameworks: the functionalist-typological approach, markedness theory, and theta as a sub-theory of Government and Binding (GB) theory.

Arousing and Mastering Feelings of Alien Inspiration in One's Own Speech: Pragmatics of the Shamanic Songs of the Suruí of Rondônia (Southern Amazonia)

This article argues that the spiritual inspiration required, according to the Suruí shamans, to utter their supposedly immutable songs, may be traced back to specific linguistic features of these songs: prominent prosodic structure, syntagmatic structure that follows complex principles, indeterminacy of the reference of some deictic pronouns, and paradoxical use of evidential markers.

Pronouns and Reflexives Revisited

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an illustration of why a reflexive cannot bind a pronoun. There has been a controversy in theoretical syntax as to why a reflexive cannot bind a pronoun. To answer the question of why caki ‘self’ cannot bind ku ‘he’ in configurations where ku ‘he’ is linked to caki ‘self’, we propose in this paper that a pronoun X cannot be bound to its antecedent Y if a less referential reflexive Z precedes the more referential pronoun X. A consequence of adopting this idea as a condition on binding phenomena is that a more referential pronoun must precede a less referential reflexive. Thus our analysis has the effect of the hierarchy in (i): (i) antecedent ＞ more referential pronoun ＞ less referential reflexive. Also, we argue in this paper that two occurrences of either reflexives or pronouns without an antecedent can both bear the same index. We assume that topic-prominent languages such as Korean allow zero topics that bind the two occurrences of either reflexives or pronouns and that reflexives or pronouns in subject and object positions are variables bound by empty topics. Finally, we demonstrate that the two occurrences of reflexives and pronouns yield the perfect reading and binding phenomena in sentences with reflexives and pronouns in series can be captured properly through linking rather than through coindexing.

“Cuando tú eres yo: la inespecificidad referencial de tú como objetivación del discurso”

Fecha de recepción: 28 de abril de 2011.Fecha de aceptación: 18 de septiembre de 2012. La referencia genérica o inespecífica de la segunda persona del singular(tú) ha recibido atención en la tradición gramatical española.Cuando dicha persona se aleja de la deixis interlocutiva de segundapersona, estamos ante un recurso de objetivación en el discurso, queutilizan los hablantes para expresar contenidos proposicionales basadosen la esfera del yo, aportando un significado epistémico. Talrecurso se analiza en dos corpus de lengua española de distinta naturaleza(oral y escrito) y desde una perspectiva variacionista cognitiva,según la cual la prominencia y la informatividad de los referentes desegunda persona propician respectivamente la expresión y la omisiónde este pronombre, así como su distinta distribución textual.

Who are ‘we’ in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese? Expression and reference of first person plural subject pronouns

Peninsular Spanish (PS) and European Portuguese (EP) are null subject languages where subject person is expressed by verbal affixes and the use of subject pronouns is considered to be reserved e.g. for such purposes as the expression of contrast or emphasis. However, the use of pronominal subjects differs strikingly between the two languages. The present study examines the use of first person plural subject pronouns (PS nosotros and EP no´s) in corpora of spoken language and connects it with the different referential properties of first person plural. It is shown that in PS the expression of the subject pronoun nosotros is rare – it occurs only in 4.5% of all clauses with first person plural subjects – and the reference of the pronoun is always hearer-exclusive in the data under survey. In EP, the expression of the first person plural subject pronoun no´s is more frequent, occurring in 32.2% of the clauses with first person plural subjects. In EP, the use of the pronoun is not restricted to the hearer-exclusive reading but is also found in contexts where the reference is construed as hearer-inclusive or impersonal. A further difference between PS and EP is that the latter has developed, in addition to first person plural proper, another construction with first person plural reference consisting of the expression a gente (literally ‘the people’) and a verb in third person singular. In the data examined, the construction with a gente is favoured with certain non-agentive verb lexemes: this tendency is argued to be connected with the origin of a gente as an impersonalizing strategy. Using evidence from contrastive analysis of two closely related languages, the paper argues that null subject languages and grammatical persons are highly divergent with regard to the frequency of subject pronoun expression and the factors affecting it.

Information structure effects on anaphora resolution in German and French: A crosslinguistic study of pronoun resolution

This paper presents an off-line study consisting of five questionnaires in which we observed interpretational preferences for ambiguous intra-sentential pronouns in parallel structures in German and French. We tested the influence of information structural factors, in particular, we compared the effects of topicalizing versus focusing potential antecedents of the ambiguous pronoun. Results replicated a baseline difference between the two languages: a subject preference in German and an object preference in French (Hemforth et al. 2010). We argue that the object preference in French is due to the fact that speakers take into account an alternative nonambiguous construction. In addition, we found that in both languages, topicalization enhances, but focusing reduces the accessibility of antecedents for pronouns in the same sentence. This stands in contrast with previous results showing an equal accessibility of focused and topicalized referents for pronouns in subsequent sentences (Cowles et al. 2007). We explain this difference with the different function of focus within and across sentences.

FMRI evidence for strategic decision-making during resolution of pronoun reference

Pronouns are extraordinarily common in daily language yet little is known about the neural mechanisms that support decisions about pronoun reference. We propose a large-scale neural network for resolving pronoun reference that consists of two components. First, a core language network in peri-Sylvian cortex supports syntactic and semantic resources for interpreting pronoun meaning in sentences. Second, a frontal–parietal network that supports strategic decision-making is recruited to support probabilistic and risk-related components of resolving a pronoun's referent. In an fMRI study of healthy young adults, we observed activation of left inferior frontal and superior temporal cortex, consistent with a language network. We also observed activation of brain regions not associated with traditional language areas. By manipulating the context of the pronoun, we were able to demonstrate recruitment of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during probabilistic evaluation of a pronoun's reference, and orbital frontal activation when a pronoun must adopt a risky referent. Together, these findings are consistent with a two-component model for resolving a pronoun's reference that includes neuroanatomic regions supporting core linguistic and decision-making mechanisms.

Effects of Stress and Working Memory Capacity on Foreign Language Readers’ Inferential Processing During Comprehension

Although stress is frequently claimed to impede foreign language (FL) reading comprehension, it is usually not explained how. We investigated the effects of stress, working memory (WM) capacity, and inferential complexity on Spanish FL readers’ inferential processing during comprehension. Inferences, although necessary for reading comprehension, vary in inferential complexity and WM demands. We measured 55 intermediate‐level Spanish FL learners’ reading comprehension, using questions with three levels of inferential complexity: non‐inference (factual), bridging inference (pronoun referent), and pragmatic inference. We measured participants’ WM capacity and varied their stress level between blocks using a video camera. Results showed that higher WM learners were more accurate overall. Inference construction during comprehension was negatively related to inferential complexity. Stress increased processing time overall, with a trend toward greater effect on response times (RTs) for questions requiring greater inferential complexity. Higher WM learners showed a greater effect of inferential complexity on RTs than lower WM learners. More generally, and consistent with the Eysenck, Santos, Derekschan, and Calvo's (2007) Attentional Control Theory, analyses showed that higher WM learners strategically traded reading speed (processing efficiency) for greater comprehension accuracy (processing effectiveness), whereas lower WM learners only did so under stress and did so less successfully. Thus, stress impedes FL reading comprehension through interactions between WM capacity and inferential complexity, and such effects are moderated by strategy use.

Rules of engagement: incomplete and complete pronoun resolution.

Research on shallow processing suggests that readers sometimes encode only a superficial representation of a text and fail to make use of all available information. Greene, McKoon, and Ratcliff (1992) extended this work to pronouns, finding evidence that readers sometimes fail to automatically identify referents even when these are unambiguous. In this paper we revisit those findings. In 11 recognition probe, priming, and self-report experiments, we manipulated Greene et al.'s stories to discover under what circumstances a pronoun's referent is automatically understood. We lengthened the stories from 4 to 8 lines. This simple manipulation led to automatic and correct resolution, which we attribute to readers' increased engagement with the stories. We found evidence of resolution even when the additional text did not mention the pronoun's referent. In addition, our results suggest that the pronoun temporarily boosts the referent's accessibility, an advantage that disappears by the end of the next sentence. Finally, we present evidence from memory experiments that supports complete pronoun resolution for the longer but not the shorter stories.

“Disagreeing” pronominal reference in Swedish and the interplay between formal and semantic gender

This paper investigates two types of apparent disagreement phenomena in Swedish: cross-sentential reference when a pronoun and its antecedent seem to disagree in formal gender (and sometimes also in number), and “topic doubling”, i.e. when a clause initial noun phrase is doubled by a pronoun that appears to have a different formal gender (and sometimes also number) specification. In order to explain the apparent disagreement, the feature set-up of the four non-plural 3rd person pronouns is examined. It is argued that Swedish has two versions of the 3rd person pronouns det (it.neut) ‘it’ and den (it.common) ‘it’, one referential pronoun (R-pronoun) and one syntactic pronoun (S-pronoun). S-pronouns make reference to linguistic entities, whereas R-pronouns link directly to discourse entities. It is also argued that the R-pronoun det (it.neuter) ‘it’, which is used in the two “disagreement” constructions, is deficient and lacks a number feature.A four-way semantic gender system is proposed, each gender corresponding to a pronoun. It is proposed that formal gender features are not present in the narrow syntax, but added post-syntactically. The role of formal gender is to render visible the presence or absence of other features, in particular number.

How different are expletive and referential pronouns? A parsing perspective

Abstract An expletive use of the third person pronoun ta in Mandarin Chinese poses a number of theoretical challenges which have not been met satisfactorily by existing analyses. In this paper we propose a unitary analysis of expletive and referential uses of the pronoun within the framework of Dynamic Syntax ( Kempson et al., 2001; Cann et al., 2005 ). Since the distinction between the different uses of the same pronominal form is determined only by looking at the context that involves both local and external linguistic content, ta can be treated uniformly as a place-holder projecting an interim value which is contextually provided. While the referential pronoun takes its value from an antecedent, the expletive takes its value from a postverbal indefinite expression. Both processes are pragmatic in nature, in that the content of different types of pronouns, though underspecified by their form, is enriched from context.

How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology (review)

Reviewed by: How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology David McCraw (bio) Cai Zong-qi . How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 456 pp. Paperback $35.00, ISBN 978-0-231-13941-0. The world could definitely use a good undergraduate textbook that covers traditional Chinese poetry. Those of us who teach survey courses have either made do with inadequate anthologies, or made up our own materials, in frustration. Surely, an off-the-shelf one-volume textbook would find wide welcome among literature teachers? Cai Zongqi's volume looks like it could fill this void. It includes 400 pages of scholarly contributions with one expert writing a chapter on each of eighteen chronologically selected topics, a neatly thematic index, and extensive appendices, including a welcome list of words with final stops that modern Mandarin has lost. It even claims to focus attention on formal and prosodic issues. Sounds promising; we read with high expectations! On reading Cai's preface, we immediately get pulled up short by his assertion that this anthology will "help students overcome language barriers and engage with Chinese poetical texts in ways that yield as much aesthetic pleasure and intellectual insight as one gets from the originals" (p. xxi). Well, since we are dealing with an undergraduate textbook here, that seems too high an ideal. However, adding the Chinese might enrich the experiences of those students with enough Chinese to divine some of the sense under the translations. In his next paragraph, Cai asserts "classical Chinese poetry may be regarded as a living tradition"; from my experience with young Chinese students, this also rings too idealistic. Bold claims continue. Cai recommends that "like Chinese readers, students should be able to see the physical shape of a poem in Chinese, read it out loud, and hear it read fluently in the original." Now we are sure his vision of an undergrad literature class belongs to fantasy; this textbook will certainly not achieve that aim—not without adding years of hard work at the language! Furthermore, what does he mean by "original"? Given this volume's nearly exclusive reliance on Mandarin romanizations, you could wonder whether he thinks ancient and medieval poets spoke like people in Beijing today. Then Cai reveals we have worse problems than just his overly ambitious goals. He continues: "[T]he inclusion of Chinese texts reveals the nonalphabetical nature of Chinese writing. The romanizations make apparent the monosyllabic and tonal nature of Chinese characters. They carry tone marks that will aid students in reading poems aloud. . . ." Nonsense! Including Chinese texts reveals nothing unless you can already read Chinese. Languages can be monosyllabic and tonal (though we could argue at considerable length whether this generalization always applied to Old Chinese), but characters do not carry tone marks. In fact, characters by themselves do not tell us how to read them—as experience with Japanese would [End Page 22] convince anyone. Cai has made some sort of blunder; has he here (as later on) confused talk of language with talk of its writing system? Or, perhaps more probably, has he committed a simple English error by an inadvertently ambiguous pronoun reference? In either case, this muddled statement will surely mislead undergrads. The curmudgeon in me starts to raise his churlish head. Cai continues by claiming that his translations "afford a direct look at the noninflectional nature of Chinese and demonstrate how the absence of inflectional tags changes the entire dynamic of reading. Instead of being told the poet's feelings and thoughts, we are often expected to experience them ourselves while creatively engaging words and images in a dynamic interplay." First, we doubt any translation could "afford" all that. Second, does Cai really want to argue that, when the Chinese poet says "Today I'm unhappy," readers will experience this vicariously in a way that they could not if a Latin poet or a French poet said so? We take leave of this preface with unease, still hoping the rest of this volume may redeem a bad preface. Unfortunately, Cai's introduction does little to dispel that unease. It contains additional English problems: consider "probably a major theme" (p...

Cohésion et hiérarchisation des unités intonatives et textuelles dans l'oral spontané en français : constantes et variations dans un corpus de 3 locuteurs de 30 ans

Our thesis offers a study of the procedures of cohesion and hierarchization in oral French, on the basis of a corpus of three speakers (two females and one male, all of them in their thirties and living in Ile-de-France, the Paris Metropolitan area) who recorded themselves in several situations of their everyday life. The statistical study of a perception test of some extracts of the corpus has enabled us to build hypotheses about the clues used by lambda individuals to cut and to link words when perceiving the speech they hear. An analysis of the whole of the corpus was then carried out integrating both qualitative and quantitative aspects. That analysis was based on the Morel & Danon- Boileau (1998, 2003) hypotheses on the structure of the intonative paragraph and on the management of dialogue on the one hand, and on the other hand Charolles’ works (1997, 2005) on the value and impact of the connecting words and the framing adverbials. As far as the intonative paragraph is concerned, the quantitative study of the constitutive elements of the preambles as well as the different types of rhema and post-rhema allowed precise results that had been given by previous studies to underline the recurrent rules of distribution and the frequency of the marks that were observed, but also to put an emphasis on specificities linked to the situations and individual variations of the speakers in our corpus. On another hand, the research on the impact of the connecting and the framing words has helped us extract an original textual unit with a larger impact than that of the intonative paragraph: we called it the “episode”. It is articulated in “phases” whose cohesion is ensured by the continuity of the referential pronouns (personal or relative pronouns), and whose limits are marked by punctuants that are specific to oral language, among which the marks of the listener’s attention to the speech being heard are included. At the end of our research, we were eventually able to list the general clues of hierarchization and of cohesion that are independent from the situation (linking words, punctuants, personal and relative pronouns, frames, detachments) and to find and determine the specificities related to the different genres of oral interaction (narration, professional dialogue, informal conversation).

Variabilism

Variabilism is the view that proper names (like pronouns) are semantically represented as variables. Referential names, like referential pronouns, are assigned their referents by a contextual variable assignment (Kaplan 1989). The reference parameter (like the world of evaluation) may also be shifted by operators in the representation language. Indeed verbs that create hyperintensional contexts, like `think', are treated as operators that simultaneously shift the world and assignment parameters. By contrast, metaphysical modal operators shift the world of assessment only. Names, being variables, refer rigidly in the latter merely intensional contexts, but may vary their reference in hyperintensional contexts. This conforms to the intuition that the content of attitude ascriptions encapsulates referential uncertainty. Furthermore, names in hyperintensional contexts are ambiguous between de re* and de dicto* interpretations. This fact is used to account for asymmetric mistaken identity attributions (for example, Biron thinks Katherine is Rosaline, but he doesn't think Rosaline is Katherine).The variable theory compares favorably with its alternatives, including Millianism and descriptivism. Millians cannot account for the behavior of names in hyperintensional contexts, while descriptivists cannot generate a necessary contrast between intensional and hyperintensional contexts. No other theory can capture the facts pertaining to the existentially bound use of names.

Capacité de mémoire de travail et traitement du pronom chez l’enfant

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and reading comprehension in children by testing the processing of pronouns. Two groups of nine- to ten-year-old children classified as high span and low span were administered a pronoun processing task. In this task, the computation of the antecedent referent for pronouns was varied by manipulating the distance between the pronoun and its antecedent and the availability of a gender cue. The results showed that compared to high-span children, low-span children experienced more difficulties in computing a pronoun's referent. High-span children spent longer reading sentences containing anaphoric pronouns when pronouns could not be resolved on the basis of the gender alone, suggesting that the pronouns were resolved as they were read. Low-span children tended to delay resolution until it was required by the task. In the question-answering times, low-span children were more adversely affected by distance than high-span children. Altogether these findings support the view that working memory capacity constrains resolution of anaphoric pronouns in children.

Short Article: They're Digging up the Road Again: The Processing Cost of Institutional They

It is commonplace to use the pronoun they to refer to agents in certain situations without ever providing a referent, as in On the train, they served really bad coffee. Such an example we call "Institutional They", because such defaults typically represent the actions of some agent tied stereotypically to a situation. These cases represent an important subset of unheralded pronouns (Gerrig, 1986), pronouns without any explicit antecedent. While in many situations, the occurrence of referential pronouns without explicit antecedents entails a processing cost, an eye-tracking experiment revealed no reliable detectable costs associated with Institutional They. However, there were for singular pronouns without antecedents in the same situations. We argue that Institutional They cases result from properties of plural pronouns (they and them). These will accept underspecified type-referents, while singular pronouns require specified token-referents. Failure to identify token-referents results in disruption of processing in the case of singulars, but not in the case of the plurals.

Gender shifts in the history of English (review)

Reviewed by: Gender shifts in the history of English by Anne Curzan Terttu Nevalainen Gender shifts in the history of English. By Anne Curzan. (Studies in English language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 223. ISBN 0521820073. $85 (Hb). Anne Curzan begins her monograph by telling how she was voted the ‘Word of the millennium’ at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in 2000. This piece of recent history is a fitting introduction to her book highlighting the role of anaphoric personal pronouns in the fundamental change that English underwent from grammatical to natural gender in the course of the last millennium. C takes a broad view of gender in chronological and linguistic terms, including the topic of language and gender in public debates in the English-speaking world over the last few decades. This concern for current relevance makes the book informative not only for language professionals but also for the general reader interested in language. Starting from the present, C places issues such as the generic use of the masculine pronoun he in the bigger picture of linguistic gender in the history of English. She does this by approaching the topic from three interrelated angles: (i) the development of personal pronoun reference to animate beings, (ii) the loss of grammatical gender and the concomitant rise of natural gender in personal pronouns referring to inanimate objects, and (iii) the semantic shifts in the lexical fields of words that clearly retain gender in a natural gender system, that is, the words for ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘girl’, and ‘boy’ (6). Ch. 1 introduces the theoretical terms in which the shift from Old English grammatical gender to natural gender in Middle English and its manifestations today can be accounted for. C’s approach crosses disciplinary boundaries by including social and cultural considerations besides linguistic ones. Charles Hockett’s definition (cited in Corbett 1991:1) provides the umbrella term for linguistic gender ‘as a system of noun classification reflected in associated words’. This definition covers both semantic and grammatical gender, based on whether the semantics of a noun defines its gender (semantic or natural gender) or not (grammatical gender). C’s study focuses on the loss of grammatical gender as it is reflected in personal pronoun anaphora, that is, outside the noun phrase rather than inside it, in patterns of agreement between nouns and their determiners and modifiers. This perspective is informed by the agreement hierarchy proposed by Corbett (1991), which provides a principled tool for tracing the erosion of grammatical gender (19). Moving from left to right, the hierarchy marks an increasing likelihood of semantic gender agreement in a language. At all times third-person personal pronouns stand out as the category most likely to show semantic rather than grammatical agreement with their antecedents. (1) attributive < predicate < relative pronoun < personal pronoun The modern natural gender system in English can thus be viewed as the endpoint of a crosslinguistically attested diachronic development, not a historical anomaly. But this scalar framework can entail problems for the traditional view that gender is a fixed property of the word. The issue is connected with the fact that gender is a covert category even in languages with natural gender such as Modern English and that ‘the English people are consistently inconsistent in [End Page 880] their choice of gendered pronouns according to strict natural gender rules’ (20). Inconsistency particularly occurs in gender assignment to inanimate nouns. C therefore advocates a more dynamic view of gender as a cultural construct to account for both synchronic variation and historical changes. Ch. 2 shows that coming to grips with the notion of gender has not always been easy in histories of English. C’s discussion here as elsewhere is balanced and comprehensive, painting a broad picture of the history of the discipline from prescientific accounts to standard reference works and more specific treatments, including the controversy over Middle English being a creole (a view C rejects). Tracing back earlier uses of the term ‘gender shift’, one could add Poussa (1992:408), who launched the term ‘Great gender shift’ in her study of the demonstratives this and that. How can a historical linguist then document this shift from grammatical to...