Acceso usuarios
Arrondissement de Lyon, Francia
This article investigates a phenomenon which, though marginal, is important to linguistic theory: the use of feminine pronouns with weather verbs in contemporary colloquial English (e.g. She’s snowing pretty good). Such uses, mentioned in a few studies only, with examples mostly drawn from fiction, have never been analysed in detail, despite a wide literature on the use of he/she for inanimate reference. The aim of the study is first to get a better understanding of the phenomenon, based on non-fictional utterances. It is shown that the data must be divided into two subsets: cases of anaphora, in which she signals personification, and less referential uses, in which the feminine pronoun emphasizes emotional involvement. This latter set is particularly important for gender research: it confirms that this emotional value of the feminine pronoun, which has been noted for inanimate reference, exists even when there is no clearly identifiable referent. The article then looks into the motivations behind the use of animate pronouns with weather verbs, taking into account the long-standing debate over the status of it in the same contexts in more formal registers. It proposes that in a number of cases in which she does not have a textual antecedent, the pronoun does not have an actual referent, but that owing to three converging factors, a slight degree of referentiality is projected on it.
