1 Introduction
English pronominal genderFootnote 2 is a semantic, as opposed to formal, system in which the sex of the referent is a major determining factor (Corbett Reference Corbett1991: 12). As Huddleston & Pullum et al. (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 488) state, ‘[i]n the most straightforward cases, he is used for males, she for females, and it for entities that are neither male nor female’. For instance, my father, one woman and my diary respectively take he, she and it as their co-referring anaphors. This strong relationship between linguistic gender and biological sex, however, is by no means a one-to-one correlation: it is only with human beings (and even then not babies) that such a correlation is found (ibid.). In references to animals it has been well established since Sweet (Reference Sweet1898: 42) that the neuter is not uncommon. For instance, Corbett (Reference Corbett1991: 12) notes ‘a high degree of variability for animals’, while Swan (Reference Swan1997: 219) does not include them in his introductory account of gender selection: ‘Usually people are he or she and things are it’. This lack of correlation has led linguists to formulate a specific gender choice criterion for references to animals. It varies from one work to another but always pertains to speaker's point of view, with such notions as projection of personality (Sweet Reference Sweet1898: 42; Curme Reference Curme1931: 551; Quirk et al. Reference Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik1985: 341; Leech & Svartvik Reference Leech and Svartvik1994: 56), familiarity (Zandvoort Reference Zandvoort1965: 132; Biber et al. Reference Biber, Leech, Conrad and Finegan1999: 317), animal thought of in its individual aspect (Kruisinga & Erades Reference Kruisinga and Erades1960: 445; Morris Reference Morris1997: 158), greater degree of interest or empathy (Jespersen 1942: 209; Joly Reference Joly1987: 234; Biber et al. Reference Biber, Leech, Conrad and Finegan1999: 317; Huddleston & Pullum et al. Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 489) and relevance or importance of sex (Roggero Reference Roggero1988: 202; Sinclair Reference Sinclair1990: 29).
The aim of the present study is to establish whether point of view still prevails in references to animals when the antecedent noun specifies the sex of the referent (e.g. stallion, ewe). Although it is well established that it does not mean ‘neither male nor female’, Huddleston & Pullum et al. (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 489) note that ‘[i]n many cases the neuter pronoun is used because the speaker doesn't know what the sex is, though we may also use he or she in such contexts’. The question examined here is how common the neuter is when the speaker knows the sex of the animal and specifies it in the antecedent noun – in other words, when the information is part of the categorisation of the referent at the point when the antecedent is uttered. All that is established about this specific case is that a neuter pronoun is possible (Huddleston & Pullum et al. Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 488; Gardelle Reference Gardelle2006: 109; Siemund Reference Siemund2008: 1). It is attested both in contemporary English, as illustrated by (1), and in early modern English, in which the animate genders were more common in references to animals (2):
(1) The cow is either admitted for milking, or it may be turned away. (Siemund Reference Siemund2008: 1) (ICE-GB W2A-033064)
(2) Sir Jo Finch told us of an exquisite poyson of the D: of Florences that kill'd with a drop: That drawing a threit and needle dipt in it thro a hens thigh it perish'd immediately. (Evelyn 1661: 190; Gardelle Reference Gardelle2006: 109)
However, there is no quantitative assessment of the phenomenon. The present article therefore proposes a statistical analysis of gender use in personal pronouns in the specific cases in which the antecedent noun gives the sex of the animal. The analysis is carried out at the scale of the multi-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). After detailing the data collection procedure (section 2), the study examines three questions in turn (sections 3 to 5). First of all, how common is the neuter in those cases? Secondly, is the relative frequency of the neuter pronoun the same with female animals as with males? Finally, does the position of the anaphor relative to its antecedent affect gender use? In particular, is the neuter disfavoured when the anaphor is part of the same clause or of the same sentence as its sex-denoting antecedent? All the analyses were made using R version 2.14.1.Footnote 3 The tests carried out are Pearson's chi-square test complemented by the odds ratio estimate. p-values lower than 0.05 (p < 0.05) were considered to be statistically significant.Footnote 4
2 Data collection procedure
The corpus used for the present study is the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which, when the data were collected (March to May 2011), contained 176,389 texts (425 million words) spanning the period 1990–2011 (20 million words per year). The corpus is designed to be balanced and representative of English language use in the United States. It is equally divided among five genres: spoken (90 million words, although the occurrences are taken from TV and radio programmes, rather than from free conversation), fiction (85 million words, from short stories to movie scripts), popular magazines (90 million words from nearly 100 different publications in a variety of domains, such as news, health or hunting), newspapers (87 million words, from more than 10 different titles) and academic texts (86 million words from about 100 peer-reviewed journals).
In order to draw a list of all the sex-specific nouns denoting animals a systematic search for the words male and female was carried out in the definition field of the Oxford English Dictionary (online edition).Footnote 5 From the 3,040 occurrences (1,115 for male, 1,925 for female) the relevant headwords – sex-specific nouns for animals – were extracted. As most headwords specifying sex proved to be for human beings, the process only yielded 63 nouns. That figure does not include compounds with he, she, lady or man as their first element, which were not retained. In the case of lady and man (e.g. lady elephant), the possible personification involved in the use of the noun could have biased the results. As for he and she (e.g. he-goat), the OED does not provide a list of entries, so that exhaustiveness could not be achieved. A distinct study of the influence of those modifiers on pronominal gender would have to be carried out. All the potentially sex-neutral nouns (e.g. duck, which can denote the species as well as the female of the species) were also discarded and are therefore not included in the count.
The 63 nouns obtained were then searched for in the COCA. Thirty of them (such as cock-lobster, spawner or vixen) returned no hits, either for the noun itself or for occurrences of the noun with a co-referential pronoun. As a result the number of nouns considered here is 33: 16 for males and 17 for females, among which 4 nouns denote sex for more than one species (buck/doe and male/female).Footnote 6 For each noun, all the hits were read in their context of use in order to determine whether there was a co-referential pronoun. The COCA interface enables an automatic search for collocates, but within nine words to the left or right only, which could have restricted the study. The procedure was therefore carried out manually, and although the mean distance between the anaphoric pronoun and its antecedent was eventually found to be 6.16 words, there were indeed 165 relevant occurrences of pronouns further away than 9 words. For reasons of feasibility, when there were well over 1,000 occurrences (as was the case for 19 nouns, for instance 8,563 hits for buck), the search was limited to a random 1,000, as permitted by the COCA interface. A further restriction was imposed on male and female. Their use as heads of noun phrases being extremely uncommon compared to modifier uses, two samples of 1,000 utterances failed to show any occurrences with co-referential pronouns. An automatic search for the two nouns with collocating pronouns was therefore carried out, but none were found to be co-referential in references to animals. It was consequently decided to restrict the search by imposing a determiner. A sample with a male / a female only showed results in compounds or for human beings, so that the search was eventually restricted to the male / the female. The figures obtained for these antecedents were included, but only once a comparison of the corpus data with and without these two nouns showed that the determiner restriction did not bias the results. Finally, occurrences of pronouns for dead animals, which occurred in the context of hunting or cooking, were discarded, as the [-animate] feature could have had an additional influence on gender selection.
What can be concluded from the data collection is that in a majority of utterances the nouns under study do not present co-referential pronouns in the COCA, either because the referent is not mentioned later on or because subsequent reference does not involve a personal pronoun. Out of the 23,519 utterances examined, only 734 pronominal references were found with sex-specific antecedent nouns for living animals: 413 for males (including 29 for the male) and 321 for females (including 18 for the female). The figure, however, is high enough for reliable statistical analyses.
Another initial finding is that most of the nouns for which there are hits share a morphological characteristic: they are not morphologically related to a noun that denotes the other sex (e.g. bull, ewe). Only two nouns are derivatives (tigress, leopardess) and six are compounds sharing one element with the noun for the other sex (e.g. cock pheasant/hen pheasant). Because the number of occurrences for derivatives and compounds is too low for reliable statistics (7 and 10 occurrences respectively), it has not been possible to establish whether the morphological pattern of the sex-specific noun had an influence on gender selection. A specific study of this variable would need to be carried out based on a different corpus.
3 Analysis of the discrepancies between pronominal gender and sex
The data show that the neuter is far from marginal: it is found in 17.7 per cent of pronouns (table 1).
Gender distribution in the corpus
The first conclusion to be drawn is that the sole criterion of sex is clearly insufficient to account for gender use even when the antecedent noun specifies the sex of the animal. This suggests that in those cases, as with other nouns, point of view has a major influence on gender selection. For instance, one reads:
(3) The sow lifts its snout towards him and exhales sharply. (Southern Review 29: 2, 1993)
(4) It goes for the largest male in the troop first. The male rears back on its hefty tail and gives some nasty blows with its powerful hind. . . (Analog Science Fiction & Fact 131: 1/2, 2011)
For three of the nouns under study the animate genders and the neuter are even found in similar proportions: cock (11 he, 10 it), ram (5 he, 6 it) and stag (12 he, 12 it).Footnote 7
It could be argued that for some nouns such as stallion, a small minority of speakers might not know that the nouns denote sex and that as a consequence, they might use them as though they were sex-neutral. This, however, cannot account for the extent of the discrepancy between pronominal gender and sex in the corpus. For instance, speakers using cock (11 he, 10 it) can be expected to be aware that the referent is a male.
One question raised by table 1 is whether the ratio of animate genders is higher with sex-specific antecedent nouns than with sex-neutral nouns. A major practical problem is that for the latter it is impossible to isolate the references in which the sex of the animal is known to the speaker: the context rarely provides clues to establish that. Still, a comparison of gender distribution between the two types of nouns puts the findings given in table 1 in perspective. Rather than consider all the sex-neutral nouns of English, which would be far beyond the scope of the present study, I decided to consider only those with sex-specific counterparts in the corpus, so as to compare data for the same species. In other words, pronominal anaphors for cock-pheasant, ewe and so on were compared with those of pheasant, sheep and the like.Footnote 8 For the sex-neutral nouns the figures for each gender were collected in the COCA following the same procedure as that detailed in section 1. The results are given in table 2.
Gender distribution with sex-specific antecedent nouns and their sex-neutral counterparts
Table 2 shows that for animals of the same species the animate genders are used in 75 per cent of pronouns when the antecedent noun is sex-specific, as against 43.8 per cent when the noun is sex-neutral. This difference in proportion is statistically significant (p < 0.001). The odds ratio estimate shows more precisely that the animate genders are 3.857 times more likely when the antecedent noun is sex-specific (95% CI = 2.142 to 6.944, p < 0.001Footnote 9). It should not necessarily be concluded from these figures that knowing the sex entails a higher chance of an animate gender: use of a sex-neutral noun does not mean that the sex of the referent is not known, as illustrated by (5):
(5) I had just carefully closed my truck door when a turkey gobbledFootnote 10 from its roost tree close by. (Outdoor Life 189: 3, 1992)
What can be concluded, however, is that use of a sex-specific noun when a strictly sex-neutral one exists increases by 3.857 the likelihood of an animate gender in the anaphor.
Coming back to the set of sex-specific nouns, another question to be answered is whether the proportion of neuter decreases when the noun that denotes sex is not species-specific. Indeed, in that case the sex information could be expected to be more salient because there is less other information. The nouns concerned in the corpus are buck and doe, which do not specify one species but are restricted to a subset of animals, and male and female, which only denote sex.
It is not found to be less common for buck and doe than it is in the overall corpus. The proportion is even slightly higher (19.5 vs 17.7 per cent), although the difference is not statistically significant (p = 0.785). With male and female the proportion of neuter seems much lower (6.4 vs 17.7 per cent), but given that the data for these nouns are restricted to the male and the female, the figure must be assessed in comparison with the + [other nouns] only. The data are given in table 4.
Gender distribution with sex-denoting antecedent nouns that are not species-specific
Gender distribution when the antecedent is a definite description
The neuter pronoun occurs in 6.4 per cent of cases with the male or the female as antecedent NP against 16.3 per cent with other definite descriptions. This difference, however, is not statistically significant (p = 0.073). If one isolates references to males the differences in proportions (10.3 vs 21.1 per cent) are even more clearly found not to be significant (table 5 – p = 0.172).Footnote 12
Gender distribution for males when the antecedent is a definite description
It must therefore be concluded that at least when the antecedent is a definite description, the fact that the noun only gives information about sex, rather than sex and the species, does not have a statistically significant influence on gender selection in the anaphor.
4 References to males compared with references to females
As stated in section 2, the only three animals for which the neuter and an animate gender were found in similar proportions were all males (antecedent nouns cock, ram and stag) and there are three occurrences of it with the male against none for the female. Thus what needs to be examined now is whether gender distribution differs for males and females. The question is all the more relevant because, when the sex of an animal is not specifically known to the speaker, the animate gender typically used is the masculine (Gardelle Reference Gardelle2006: 542).Footnote 13 This is true whatever the size of the animal – a mosquito, a rat, a turtle or a giraffe, for instance – and exceptions are restricted to a very small number of referents – mainly cats (for some speakers only) and animals viewed specifically as prey. This would tend to suggest that in the perception of animals the female sex is viewed as more marked than the male; the neuter might therefore be disfavoured for females.
Gender distribution according to sex is shown in table 6. The neuter is indeed more common for males. It occurs in 22.8 per cent of references to males as against 11.2 per cent for females, and the difference in proportion is statistically significant (p < 0.001). The neuter is 2.33 times more likely to be used for a male than for a female (OR = 2.333; 95%CI: 1.534 to 3.536; p < 0.001).
Gender distribution according to sex
Because the data with the antecedent nouns male and female are restricted to occurrences with the, the analysis was carried out again setting aside the occurrences for these nouns in order to see whether the finding was confirmed. The results are given in table 7. The neuter occurs in 23.7 per cent of references to males as against 11.9 per cent for females. This difference in proportion is again found to be statistically significant (p < 0.001), and the neuter is again predicted to be around 2.3 times more likely for males (OR = 2.303 ; 95%CI = 1.513 to 3.506 ; p < 0.001). It must therefore be concluded that there is an asymmetry between males and females.
Gender distribution – exclusion of the male / the female
In keeping with this, if one considers the nouns of the corpus that are part of a pair of strictly sex-specific nouns (e.g. buck/doe), there is never more neuter for the females than for the males. Leaving aside the cases with very few occurrences (< 3 for both genders), the asymmetry appears especially with the pairs listed in table 8. It is less obvious in the other three cases concerned, but the neuter is again less common for females, as shown in table 9.
Gender distribution among pairs of strictly sex-specific nouns – 1/2
Gender distribution among pairs of strictly sex-specific nouns – 2/2
No explanation other than the markedness of the female sex could be found to account for this asymmetry. If one considers buck and doe, for instance, most of the occurrences were found in articles on hunting. In other words, with speakers who are apt to feel the same level of closeness to both sexes. Moreover, the two nouns in each pair belong to the same level of vertical categorisation. Finally, none of the nouns denoting females appear more specialised or uncommon than those denoting males. Although the figures for each pair are low, they appear to confirm that sex has more influence on gender selection for females than for males.
5 Position of the anaphor relative to its antecedent
This last section examines whether the animate genders are more highly favoured when the anaphor is close to the antecedent. The question is relevant for two reasons. First of all, in same-clause contexts the anaphor bears a stronger grammatical relationship to its antecedent than in other contexts. It is part of the same constituent (the clause) and it is very often bound by its antecedent (in the sense given by Binding Theory: c-commanded by the antecedent and co-referential with it). The hypothesis to be tested is whether this favours an animate gender in the anaphor. The second reason is a cognitive one. The proximity of the antecedent might have a priming effect on the sex of the referent, which might disfavour the neuter. Furthermore, Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson Reference Sperber and Wilson1986) has shown that mentioning an item of information in context implies that it is relevant to the speaker. Choice of lexical information in discourse is guided by the Optimal Relevance principle, which is the result of a balance between processing cost and contextual effect (viz. the triggering of implications). As a result, any mention of information implies that the information is deemed worth the processing cost at the point when it is uttered. If this is applied to gender, the fact that a speaker chooses a sex-specific noun in the antecedent, at least in all the cases in which a sex-neutral word is also available, implies that sex is deemed relevant and important at that stage. When the anaphor is in the same clause as its antecedent, the point of view on the referent has to be the same as it was when the antecedent was uttered: the anaphor and its antecedent belong to the same event description. In other words, sex still has to be relevant and important to the speaker when the pronominal gender is selected. Consequently, the neuter might be expected to be disfavoured in this context.
This section first considers the overall distribution of genders according to position (table 10) and then moves on to the specific distinction between same-clause and different-clause contexts.
Gender distribution according to the position of the anaphor relative to its antecedentFootnote 14
The neuter occurs in 17 per cent of anaphors in same-clause contexts, 20.4 per cent in different clause (same sentence) contexts and 13.4 per cent of anaphors whose antecedent is in the previous sentence. These differences in proportions are not found to be statistically significant (p = 0.111). One notes a slightly lower proportion of it for next-sentence contexts compared to the other two. An additional statistical analysis along the sole criterion of sentence boundaries was therefore carried out to establish whether a sentence boundary increased the proportion of neuter pronouns (table 11).
Gender distribution according to the position of the anaphor relative to its antecedent – same/different sentence
The neuter is found in 19.4 per cent of pronouns in same-sentence contexts as against 13.2 per cent when in different sentences. P is slightly above 0.05 (p [uncorrected] = 0.059, p [correctedFootnote 15] = 0.064), so that influence of this variable cannot be established.
As for the specific hypothesis of an influence of same-clause contexts formulated at the beginning of this section, the results are given in table 12. The neuter is found in 17 per cent of pronouns in same-clause contexts as against 17.9 per cent in other contexts. This difference in proportion is not statistically significant (p = 0.816).
Gender distribution according to the position of the anaphor relative to its antecedent – same/different clause
Finally, in order to assess the possible influence of Optimal Relevance, which would only apply when the speaker could have used a sex-neutral term denoting the same species, an extraction was made of pronouns whose antecedent nouns had a specific sex-neutral counterpart (e.g. cock-pheasant, ewe), for the sole contexts in which the pronoun and the antecedent were in the same clause. Although the number of occurrences is fairly low (26 occurrences) and might therefore not guarantee reliability, it seems to show that the neuter in same-clause contexts is not any less favoured there than in the corpus as a whole: it is found in 26.9 per cent of occurrences (7 out of 26) as against 17 per cent in the corpus as a whole. Thus there is no evidence that the position of the anaphor relative to its antecedent (same clause / . . .) has any influence on gender selection.
6 Conclusion
The statistical analysis presented in this article establishes a number of facts on the relationship between pronominal gender and biological sex in the specific case in which the animal's sex is given by the antecedent noun. Some of the results are to be expected in that they confirm the modern theoretical descriptions of gender in English, while others allow for a better understanding of the system.
First of all, even when the sex is specified and part of the categorisation of the referent in context, the neuter is widely used: it accounts for over 1/6 of occurrences in the corpus (17.7 per cent). The fact that gender and sex do not correlate in references to animals is part of most grammatical descriptions, but what was less expected perhaps is the extent of this lack of correlation – 17.7 per cent of cases. This figure should be emphasised because, as was stated in the introduction, only three works among those cited mention the possibility of the neuter with sex-specific antecedent nouns, and because the notion of a core correspondence between gender and sex when the sex is known to the speaker is still found in some works that mention English gender to compare it with other, formal systems. For instance, to Mülhäusler & Harré (Reference Mülhäusler and Harré1990: 29), ‘English is strongly characterized by natural gender . . . and we can be sure of selecting the correct anaphoric third-person pronoun if we reflect on the biological sex of “man”, “cow”, “stallion” and so on.’ The present study clearly establishes that such a statement is a misrepresentation of the gender system (and not just an oversimplification), even if one considers only sex-specific nouns. By focusing solely on the distinction between sexed beings (animates, that is, humans and animals) and sexless entities (inanimates), the statement neglects the influence of another categorisation principle: the fact that humans are typically ranked higher than animals. This is encapsulated in the Animacy Hierarchy (Corbett Reference Corbett2000: 56):
\begin{equation*}
{\rm speaker} > {\rm addressee} > {\rm 3rd\, person} > {\rm kin} > {\rm human} > {\rm animate} > {\rm inanimate}\end{equation*}
This is confirmed by two other facts established in this article. Firstly, there is no statistically significant evidence in the COCA that male and female, which make the sex information particularly salient (it is their only lexical information), favour the animate genders more than other sex-specific nouns, at least in definite descriptions. Secondly, when the sex is given explicitly by a noun and when the speaker is bound to have the same point of view on the referent upon selection of the anaphor as upon selection of the antecedent (same-clause contexts), there is no statistically significant evidence that the neuter is disfavoured.
The second major finding of this study is that in the corpus, the neuter is 2.3 times more likely for males than it is for females. This fact, which does not seem to be mentioned in existing studies, could be evidence that females are regarded as the marked gender (in the sociological sense of the term, e.g. Romaine Reference Romaine2000) even among animals. This finding also provides evidence that while sex does not always trigger promotion of the referent (and thus use of he or she), it can play a part – a further study could help to determine in what contexts. In keeping with this result, the proportion of neuter was found to be lower with sex-specific nouns than with the sex-neutral nouns denoting the same species (when such nouns exist). Although in the latter case it is impossible to distinguish between the utterances in which the sex of the animal is not known to the speaker and those in which it is, the difference in proportion could point to an influence of sex in the promotion of the referent (and thus in the use of he or she).
A larger sample would allow for more fine-grained statistical studies. In particular, these could identify gender behaviour depending on species or speakers’ profiles. Given the very low proportion of sex-specific animal nouns with co-referring anaphoric personal pronouns in discourse, however (734 occurrences in a 425-million-word corpus), this was impossible to achieve. Further studies on corpora in other varieties of English would also enable us to determine whether the findings reported in this study are restricted to American English or can be considered valid for the description of pronominal gender in English as a whole.
