What did you want to imply again?
I'm doing a research project on politeness/impoliteness in (wanky posts in) fanficrants for a course on Web Linguistics. I didn't think I'd ever end up doing academic research on anything concerning fans and fandom, much less a community like fanficrants, but there you go. That, however, is just some background info: the real thing I wanted to draw attention to is the somewhat ironic use of language in one of the articles I'm using as basis for the project.
The article, found in a handbook of pragmatics, deals with the issue of implicature (what is meant by an utterance but left unsaid). All well and good. The thing that drew my attention was the way the author uses 'she' to refer to people in general. I'm perfectly aware of the issues connected with the use of general he, and I know that singular they/their isn't universally accepted as a gender-neutral way of referring to people in general. The whole phenomenon is a can of worms. I understand this, but, perhaps because my own native language only has one (gender-neutral) pronoun for he/she and thus avoids this problem entirely, I find it very tiresome. I was taught, even at university, that using they/their is an acceptable way of referring to someone in third person if the gender isn't known or in any way relevant, but I know there are people who are vehemently against this practice. The thing to keep in mind is that hardly any of the choices a writer could make are free of attitudinal and value implications. Using general he to encompass both the men and the women is seen as sexist. Using general she seems very feminist. Using 'he or she' is fine, but gets clunky if used too many times. Using singular they means breaking conventional rules of grammar. There is just no way to win, which is really annoying when I'm used to not having to pay this issue any attention when using Finnish.
To get back to the article which prompted this whole spiel: the writer used general she to refer to all humans - in an article where he discussed what is meant but not said. General she is very likely to draw people's attention, and it certainly drew mine. Now, going by what the author had written in his article, I could make the following assumptions based on his usage of the general she:
The article, found in a handbook of pragmatics, deals with the issue of implicature (what is meant by an utterance but left unsaid). All well and good. The thing that drew my attention was the way the author uses 'she' to refer to people in general. I'm perfectly aware of the issues connected with the use of general he, and I know that singular they/their isn't universally accepted as a gender-neutral way of referring to people in general. The whole phenomenon is a can of worms. I understand this, but, perhaps because my own native language only has one (gender-neutral) pronoun for he/she and thus avoids this problem entirely, I find it very tiresome. I was taught, even at university, that using they/their is an acceptable way of referring to someone in third person if the gender isn't known or in any way relevant, but I know there are people who are vehemently against this practice. The thing to keep in mind is that hardly any of the choices a writer could make are free of attitudinal and value implications. Using general he to encompass both the men and the women is seen as sexist. Using general she seems very feminist. Using 'he or she' is fine, but gets clunky if used too many times. Using singular they means breaking conventional rules of grammar. There is just no way to win, which is really annoying when I'm used to not having to pay this issue any attention when using Finnish.
To get back to the article which prompted this whole spiel: the writer used general she to refer to all humans - in an article where he discussed what is meant but not said. General she is very likely to draw people's attention, and it certainly drew mine. Now, going by what the author had written in his article, I could make the following assumptions based on his usage of the general she:
- All the (hypothetical) speakers (or language producers) he referred to are women. This option isn't even worth considering, because he is truly talking on a very general level, not just about women. And since he is a man, he can't really say men weren't true language producers. (Not that a professional linguistics scholar would say anything like that.)
- The writer is a feminist who refuses to use the archaic general he.
- The writer is fully aware of drawing readers' attention to the unconventional general she, and does it on purpose to make them think about what that implies since, after all, implicature is the topic he is discussing.