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A gender-specific pronoun is a pronoun associated with a particular grammatical gender, such as masculine, feminine, or neuter, or with a social gender (or sex), such as female or male. Examples include the English third-person personal pronouns ''he'' and ''she''. A gender-neutral pronoun, by contrast, is a pronoun that is not associated with a particular grammatical or social gender and that does not imply, for instance, male or female. Many English pronouns are gender-neutral, including ''they'' (which in certain contexts can also refer to a singular antecedent such as ''everyone'', ''a person'', or ''the patient''). Many of the world's languages do not have gender-specific pronouns. Others, however – particularly those that have a pervasive system of grammatical gender (or have historically had such a system, as with English) – have gender specificity in certain of their pronouns, particularly third-person personal pronouns. Problems of usage arise in languages such as English, in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown sex or social gender is being referred to but commonly available pronouns (''he'' or ''she'') are gender-specific. In such cases a gender-specific, usually masculine, pronoun is sometimes used with intended gender-neutral meaning; such use of ''he'' was also common in English until the middle of the twentieth century but is now controversial. Use of singular ''they'' is another common alternative, but is considered by many to be descriptively ambiguous or confusing, and demands illogical verb agreement〔https://apps.carleton.edu/student/orgs/saga/pronouns/〕 Some attempts have been made, by proponents of gender-neutral language, to introduce invented gender-neutral pronouns. ==Overview== Some languages of the world (including Austronesian languages, many East Asian languages, the Quechuan languages, and the Uralic languages〔Siewierska, Anna; ''Gender Distinctions in Independent Personal Pronouns''; in Haspelmath, Martin; Dryer, Matthew S.; Gil, David; Comrie, Bernard (eds.) ''The World Atlas of Language Structures'', pp. 182–185. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-925591-1〕) do not have gender distinctions in personal pronouns, just as most of them lack any system of grammatical gender. In others, such as many of the Niger–Congo languages, there is a system of grammatical gender (or noun classes), but the divisions are not based on sex. . In other languages – including most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages – third-person personal pronouns (at least those used to refer to people) intrinsically distinguish male from female. This feature commonly co-exists with a full system of grammatical gender, where all nouns are assigned to classes such as masculine, feminine and neuter. However in some languages, such as English, this general system of noun gender has been lost, but gender distinctions are preserved in the third-person pronouns (the singular pronouns only, in the case of English. In languages with grammatical gender, even pronouns which are semantically gender-neutral may be required to take a gender for such purposes as grammatical agreement. Thus in French, for example, the first- and second-person personal pronouns may behave as either masculine or feminine depending on the sex of the referent; and indefinite pronouns such as ''quelqu'un'' ("someone") and ''personne'' ("no one") are treated conventionally as masculine. See .) Issues concerning gender and pronoun usage commonly arise in situations where it appears necessary to choose between gender-specific pronouns, even though the sex of the person or persons being referred to is not known, not specified, or (in the plural case) mixed. In English and many other languages, the masculine form has traditionally served as the default or unmarked form; that is, masculine pronouns have been used in cases where the referent or referents are not known to be (all) female. This leads to sentences such as: *In English: ''If anybody comes, tell him.'' Here the masculine pronoun ''him'' refers to a person of unknown sex. *In French: ''Vos amis sont arrivés — ils étaient en avance'' ("Your friends have arrived – they were early"). Here the masculine plural pronoun ''ils'' is used rather than the feminine ''elles'', unless it is known that all the friends in question are female (in which case the noun would also change to ''amies'' and the past participle would change to ''arrivées''). See also . As early as 1795, dissatisfaction with this convention led to calls for gender-neutral pronouns, and attempts to invent pronouns for this purpose date back to at least 1850, although the use of singular ''they'' as a natural gender-neutral pronoun in English is much older. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gender-specific and gender-neutral pronouns」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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