Generic pronouns and their influence on the speakers' language awareness

The English language is a genderless language in which nouns receive grammatical gender through natural gender assignment. The generic pronoun encoded in English is the pronoun he, which next to its secondary meaning of the generic also has the primary meaning of the third person masculine singular. Following the moderate version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, English speaking societies may therefore be considered androcentric societies, since the unmarked use of the generic he makes everyone in this society male until explicitly proven otherwise. In this thesis I explore the history of the generic pronoun in English and offer suggestions for a change in language awareness which, in the ideal case, could result in a language change in the favor of women in society.

Name thesis:degree_name

MA

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics

Year dc:date.available

2001

Author dc:creator

• Engelhardt, Maike

Contributors dc:contributor

• Johan Seynnaeve.
• Deborah Janson
• Michael Reider

• Linguistics

Identifier

https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/823

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchrepository.wvu.edu:etd-1826