While grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in Old English, Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender. There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English. Some loanwords, words which are borrowed from other languages, inflect according to gender, such as actor/actress, where the suffix ‘-or’ denotes the masculine, and the suffix ‘-ress’ denotes the feminine. The third person singular pronouns and their possessive forms are gender specific: “he/his” (masculine gender, overall used for males), “she/her(s)” (feminine gender, for females), “it/its” (neuter gender, mainly for objects and abstractions), “one/one’s” (common gender, for anyone or anything), and “who/whose” (subordinate/ vocative gender, for someone in question). It is also important to mention that, with few exceptions, the gender of an English pronoun coincides with the real gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent, frequently different from the former in languages with true grammatical gender. The choice between “he”, “she” and “it” invariably comes down to whether they designate a human male, a human female, or something else. Some exceptions:

• Animals, which can go either way, being referred to according to their sex, or as “it”.

• The pronoun “she” is sometimes used to refer to things which contain people such as countries, ships, and cars, or to refer to machines. This, however, is considered a stylistically marked, optional figure of speech. This usage is furthermore in decline and advised against by most journalistic style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style.”

Com base no texto acima, marque verdadeiro (V) ou falso (F) para as afirmações a seguir e assinale a alternativa que contém a sequência correta, de cima para baixo:

( ) Modern English continues to be a fully inflectional language as far as the gender system is concerned.
( ) We could say that the word ‘waiter’ is masculine and ‘waitress’ is feminine.
( ) We cannot say that the third person singular pronouns are gender specific.
( ) The text mentions no exceptions related to the gender of an English pronoun.
( ) In the sentence “Titanic struck an iceberg, and sank two hours and forty minutes later in early 15 April 1912.

At the time of her launching in 1912, she was the largest passenger steamship in the world,” the pronouns “her” and “she” are used because the ship was considered like a human being.