By Possessives, Genders

English really needs another pronoun for cases like this! Traditionally, if the gender was unknown, the masculine pronoun would be used. In a grammar book from 50 years ago, your examples would most certainly use "his." Today this would still be considered grammatically correct, but...

"Their" is used as a possessive for "the user" (to avoid gender pronouns like his or hers). "they've": they is a pronoun for "the user" and is a contraction of "they have".

When you can decide on gender (male/female) and number (singular/plural), use the respective possessive, in this case his. When you can't decide, use their or his/her. Each female officer was required to buy her own uniforms. Each officer was required to buy his/her (or their) own...

Hi, The English language unfortunately lacks a simple singular pronoun which does not specify gender, That's why i would to ask the Experts here in this Forum about this debatable question " The possessive and objective pronoun of Angel ". If i want to write a text as the following one : " I...

The English language unfortunately lacks a simple singular pronoun which does not specify gender, That's why i would to ask the Experts here in this Forum about this debatable question " The possessive and objective pronoun of Angel ". If i want to write a text as the following one : " I...

Hey, i'm new here. My name is Tim and I got this forum from a friend of mine. He told me that this might help me with the problem i got. I have a brother that is 16 years old and i'm 23( in the US Army). He needs help with his english. The teacher gave him the study guide, but no answer on...

Hey, i'm new here. My name is Tim and I got this forum from a friend of mine. He told me that this might help me with the problem i got. I have a brother that is 16 years old and i'm 23( in the US Army). He needs help with his english. The teacher gave him the study guide, but no answer on it. ...

Yulysess wrote:Hi creolejazz, The rule you search lies, I think, in the grammatical unit called "Nominal Clauses/ Nominal-ing clauses, that is, participle clauses", or as pieanne illustrated above, gerunds. The commomest type of participle clause is that which has no subject. When a is subject...

Pieanne, Thank you. I stand corrected on misstating 'their' as a pronoun. I would have asked the same question, though, about the mixture of singular, plural. Before the advent of Feminism, when 'he/his' was considered gender-neutral, do you think that the sentence would have been written,...

Hi, Davkett, Well, I'm not good at all with rules, but here's my opinion. "Everyone" obviously refers to more than 1 person, even though it's a singular. Those persons are probably a mix of both genders, but I prefer to use "their" to refer to them because it's only one word and I find the...