gender in English

No English noun belongs to an agreement class. A determiner has one form for every noun in the language, an adjective has one form for every noun it modifies, and a participle has one form wherever it appears. Nothing copies anything, and there is nothing on the noun to copy. This is the sharpest single divergence from a language whose every noun carries a class welded into the lexicon and whose determiners, adjectives and participles all reproduce it, and it is the reason the state here is absent.

The record is contested, and the disagreement is substantive rather than terminological. The third person singular pronouns divide three ways, by the sex of a human referent and by animacy otherwise, and on one well established analysis a pronoun standing for an antecedent is agreement, which would make English a language with three genders assigned on semantic grounds. The convention adopted here is the competing analysis, on two grounds stated as grounds rather than as findings. The first is that the choice is made by consulting the referent and not the word: the same noun takes a different pronoun as the referent changes sex, and a noun with no fixed referent has no fixed pronoun, whereas an agreement class is a property stored with the word and invariant across uses of it. The second is that the division touches exactly one cell of one paradigm. The plural pronoun does not divide, the possessive determiner in the plural does not divide, and no other word class in the language divides at all. A system with one contrasting cell and no agreement outside it is doing something different from a system that classifies the whole lexicon.

On either reading the fact underneath is the same and is uncontroversial: an English noun has no class, and no word in an English clause changes shape because of one. What is disputed is whether the pronoun contrast is enough to call that a gender system. The absence recorded here is the answer this graph gives to that question, and the contested status is how it says the question was answered rather than settled. No obligatoriness is recorded, because a denied dimension has nothing to be obligatory about.