Bulletin

Issue: May 2006

Books

That infuriating non-existent third person pronoun

It sounds like a line from Professor Higgins discussing the peculiarities of the English tongue – a peculiarity that still bugs journalists, writers, teachers of English and others.

It’s the non-existent genderless third person pronoun which should have a place alongside he, she, it and they.

Take this sentence for example: When a lawyer establishes a new practice he / she / it must build up a client base.

None of the three, he, she or it, is appropriate because the lawyer could be either a man or a woman and is certainly not an it. But there is simply no such genderless single third person pronoun, a weakness that English shares with a number of other languages.

The lack of the genderless third person pronoun is one of the strange aspects of our language which Professor Robert Dixon tackles in his new book A Semantic Approach to English Grammar.

The Director of La Trobe University’s Research Centre for Linguistic Typology and world renowned linguistic researcher, Professor Dixon has produced the second edition of this work for Oxford University Press.

He explains in his chapter about pronouns that the problem of the genderless third person pronoun only raised it’s head recently because for hundreds of years the third person singular masculine he was used in most circumstances. Our language took little cognisance of gender. The male dominated most grammar.

There arose a campaign against this and a new genderless pronoun per – short for person – was mooted. However this simply did not catch on.

The result is that there has been an internal shift within the pronoun system. In earlier times you was used just for second person plural but later replaced thou to cover second person singular.