everybody...their

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>>>>>>"A player has to be responsible for their actions in this league." --
>>>>>>Ernie Grunfeld
>>>
>>>>"No mother should be forced by federal prosecutors to testify against
>>>>their child." -- Monica Lewinsky's mother's attorney
>>
>>And to complete the 3rd-person singular paradigm, I heard on the idiot box
>>last night ("Animal Planet") [exact wording not guaranteed]:
>>
>>"Remember this when you leave your pet to make their own entertainment." --
>>narrator [showing 'candid' videos of pets engaged in solitary play]
>
>... But I'm not sure why you assume either the X's own
>construction or the more standard Xself reflexive "would not tend to
>require gender or number marking" in English.  True enough, the "se"
>or "si" reflexive clitic in Romance, or "sich" in German, doesn't
>distinguish gender/number, but the English reflexives certainly mark
>for both gender and number.  Am I missing something?
>
>larry
>
>>Looks like a reflexive pronoun to me, genitive/possessive in these three
>>examples. A reflexive pronoun would not tend to require gender or number
>>marking.

Well, first off, it's a mystery to me why so many languages have seemingly
useless noun classes (e.g., genders) in the first place (I'd appreciate
somebody suggesting an accessible reference on this).

Here I'm talking about a non-gender-marked reflexive pronoun -- analogous
to German "sich" (or French "se"/"soi", etc., I guess). I think -- as Larry
asserts -- it's correct that English doesn't really have one [corrections
welcome; maybe there is an obscure or archaic one]; but the above examples
suggest to me that "they"/"them"/"their" is being forced into this service.
Consider these unobjectionable (IMHO) sentences:

(1) The managers require each player to be responsible for his [own] actions.
(2) The prosecutors forced each witness to testify against her [own] child.
(3) The veterinarians allow each patient to be visited by its [own] family.

Now suppose that, for any of a number of plausible reasons, it is desired
to have these sentences ambiguous/noncommittal with respect to gender ("it"
is 'neuter' gender here): the nouns "player", "witness", "patient" are
gender-ambiguous all right, but the pronouns spoil things. Wouldn't it be
nice if we had a pronoun (say "wunself") -- something like German "sich" --
which could stand in for "himself", "herself", "itself", with a
genitive/possessive form (say "wunsown") = "his/her/its own"? Then we
wouldn't need to commit ourselves as to sex (or to "it-ness") in the above
(I'll omit number-ambiguity, which could be accommodated also); now we
would have:

(1') The managers require each player to be responsible for wunsown
actions. [proposed]
(2') The prosecutors forced each witness to testify against wunsown child.
[proposed]
(3') The veterinarians allow each patient to be visited by wunsown family.
[proposed]

This would work, I think, and apparently -- sometimes unconsciously, I
believe -- such a substitution is made in common usage, unfortunately with
the poor choice of "they"/"them"/"their [own]" instead of (for example) my
imaginary "wunself"/"wunsown". So we have:

(1") The managers require each player to be responsible for their [own]
actions.
(2") The prosecutors forced each witness to testify against their [own] child.
(3") The veterinarians allow each patient to be visited by their [own] family.

These furnish the implicitly desirable gender-ambiguity, at the (high)
price of losing the clear sense of each sentence: as presented here the
references would seem to be to the managers' actions, the prosecutors'
child, the veterinarians' family. The optional "own" in the last group
might tend to ameliorate this situation to some degree (although not fully
nor strictly), but note that it's omitted in two of the three real-life
examples at the top.

I may be getting onto thin ice here, but it seems to me that Larry's
earlier-cited examples of awkward gender assignment (except for the example
of the epicene grammarian) and many (but not all) similar problematic
expressions are also corrected by introduction of a non-gender-marked
reflexive pronoun, be it something like "wunself"/"wunsown" (imaginary) or
"they"/"them"/"their [own]" (all too real ... and too often all too inept).

-- Doug Wilson