situation in (2c & d) is the same; the anaphor must take the form herself so that it agrees in gender with the feminine Sally. Note further that a sentence like (2e) shows us that anaphors must have an antecedent. An anaphor without an antecedent is unacceptable. A plausible hypothesis (or rule) given the data in (2), then, is stated in (3):
3) An anaphor must (i) have an antecedent and (ii) agree in grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter) with that antecedent.
The next step in the scientific method is to test this hypothesis against more data. Consider the additional data in (4):
4)
1 The robot kissed itself.
2 She knocked herself on the head with a zucchini.
3 *She knocked himself on the head with a zucchini.
4 The snake flattened itself against the rock.
5 ?The snake flattened himself/herself against the rock.
6 The Joneses think themselves the best family on the block.
7 *The Joneses think himself the wealthiest guy on the block.
8 Gary and Kevin ran themselves into exhaustion.
9 *Gary and Kevin ran himself into exhaustion.
Grammatical Gender vs. Sex vs. Personal Gender
Gender can be a politically charged and deeply personal issue for many people. In this chapter, I am talking about primarily about grammatical gender. Grammatical gender is often confused with sex assigned at birth and with the gender identity/expression of the individual. This is because people often use grammatical gender to signal their sex or gender identity to others. But in the context that I’m using it here, it’s a purely formal feature of words. In many languages grammatical gender, also called noun class, has nothing to with actual sex or gender identity. For example, in Navajo grammatical gender is determined by shape, consistency and animacy and is quite distinct from their cultural understanding of gender identity. In other languages, grammatical gender does not need to correspond to gender expression – it can even be the opposite. In Modern Irish, for example, the word cailín ‘girl’ is masculine and the word stail ‘stallion’ is feminine.
Despite the objections of prescriptive language gurus, English has long used the pronoun they to refer to humans in a gender-neutral way. Recently this usage has been extended more regularly to people whose gender identity is non-binary. This new usage has some really interesting effects on the phenomenon of anaphora – in particular a new anaphor, themself, has been added to the grammatical system of many people, particularly younger speakers. General Problem Set GPS3 gives you a chance to explore the interplay of grammatical gender and personal gender with English anaphora and verb agreement.
Sentences (4a, b, & c) are all consistent with our hypothesis that anaphors must agree in gender with their antecedents, which at least confirms that the hypothesis is on the right track. What about the data in (4d & e)? It appears as if any gender is compatible with the antecedent the snake. This appears, on the surface, to be a contradiction to our hypothesis. Think about these examples a little more closely, however. Whether sentence (4e) is well- formed or not depends upon your assumptions about the gender of the snake. If you assume (or know) the snake to be male, then The snake flattened himself against the rock is perfectly well-formed. But under the same assumption, the sentence The snake flattened herself against the rock seems very odd indeed, although it is fine if you assume the snake is female. So, it appears as if this example also meets the generalization in (3); the vagueness about its well-formedness has to do with the fact that we are rarely sure what gender a snake is and not about the actual structure of the sentence.
Now, look at the sentences in (4f–i) above; note that the ill-formedness of (g) and (i) is not predicted by our generalization. In fact, our generalization predicts that sentence (4i) should be perfectly grammatical, since himself agrees in gender (masculine) with its antecedents Gary and Kevin. Yet there is clearly something wrong with this sentence. The hypothesis needs revision. It appears as if the anaphor must agree in gender and number with the antecedent. Number refers to the quantity of individuals involved in the sentence; English primarily distinguishes singular number from plural number. (5) reflects our revised hypothesis.
5) An anaphor must agree in gender and number with its antecedent.
If there is more than one person or object mentioned in the antecedent, then the anaphor must be plural (i.e., themselves).
Testing this against more data, we can see that this partially makes the correct predictions (6a), but it doesn’t properly predict the acceptability of sentences (6b–e):
6)
1 People from Tucson think very highly of themselves.
2 *I gave yourself the bucket of ice cream.
3 I gave myself the bucket of ice cream.
4 *She kissed myself.
5 She kissed herself.
Even more revision to our hypothesis is in order. The phenomenon seen in (6b–e) revolves around a grammatical distinction called person. Person refers to the perspective of the speaker with respect to the other participants in the speech act. First person refers to the speaker. Second person refers to the addressee. Third person refers to people being discussed that aren’t participating in the conversation. Here are the English pronouns associated with each person: (Nominative refers to the case form the pronouns take when in subject position like I in “I love peanut butter”; accusative refers to the form they take when in object positions like me in “John loves me”. We will look at case in much more detail in chapter 11, so don’t worry if you don’t understand it right now.)
7)
| Nominative | Accusative | Anaphoric | ||||
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | |
| 1 | I | we | me | us | myself | ourselves |
| 2 | you | you | you | you | yourself | yourselves |
| 3 masc | he | they | him | them | himself | themselves |
| 3 fem |
she
| |||||
