Generic Antecedent - Treatment in Various Languages

Treatment in Various Languages

Many languages share the following issue with English: the generic antecedent is a representative individual of a class, whose gender is unknown or irrelevant, but pronouns are gender-specific. In languages such as English that distinguish natural gender in pronouns but not grammatical gender in nouns, normally masculine, but sometimes feminine, forms of pronouns are used for the generic reference, in what is called the generic usage of the pronoun. The context makes the generic intent of the usage clear in communication.

• Example: An ambitious academic will publish as soon as she can.

Unless there is reason to believe the speaker thinks ambitious academics are always female, the use of she in this sentence must be interpreted as a generic use. Traditionally in English the singular generic pronoun has been the otherwise masculine he, but in recent decades a strand of thought has held that such usage subtly biases the listener to assume the antecedent is masculine; so various alternatives given later in this article have been proposed.