Many languages share the following issue with English: the generic antecedent is a representative individual of a class, whose gender is unknown or … 展开

Speakers of all languages use words both to make distinctions and to generalize:
• Example of distinction: My mother thinks..., but my father … 展开

• Carlson, Greg. Reference to Kinds in English. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1977.
• De Swart, H. "(In)definites … 展开

If an antecedent is a thing, either specific or generic (such as a snowman), rather than a person, the appropriate pronoun to refer back to it is it, and no difficulty arises. Likewise, if the antecedent is more than one thing, again either specific or generic, the pronoun they is used … 展开

• Donkey sentence – Sentence that resists simple formalization
• Epicenity – Quality of a word with identical female and male forms
• Gnomic aspect, also known as generic mood – Grammatical feature used to express general truths or … 展开

• Helge Lødrup. "Norwegian Anaphors without Visible Binders." Journal of Germanic Linguistics 19 (2007): 1–22. Available at http://journals.cambridge.org.
• Anna Pycha, Constance Milbrath and Stephen Eyre. "Anaphora in African-American English 展开