User:Sieben von neun/sandbox
 | This is not a Wikipedia article: This is a workpage, a collection of material and work in progress that may or may not be incorporated into Islamophobia in the media. It should not necessarily be considered factual or authoritative. |
They may be used even when the gender of the subject is obvious; they implies a generic (or representative of type class) rather than individuated interpretation:[1]
- 'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear the speech — Shakespeare, Hamlet
- There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend — Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors
- If some guy beat me up, then I'd leave them.
- Every bride hopes that their wedding day will go as planned.
Isn't the use of every</> before a singular noun used to refer to all the individual members of the group? In this case isn't "every bride" replaced with the third person plural their not the third person singular her. Although every bride hopes her wedding goes well also sounds OK. I could be wrong on that one but here is another example, which I think is better:
Every (preceding a singular noun) is used to refer to all the individual members of a set without exception. "the hotel assures every guest of personal attention"
- ^ Michael Newman (1996) Epicene pronouns: The linguistics of a prescriptive problem; Newman (1997) "What can pronouns tell us? A case study of English epicenes", Studies in language 22:2, 353–389.